


Freedom Love Joy Peace

by BecauseWhateverAtAll



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Caring!Everybody, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Protective!Everybody, Racism, Reconciliation, References to Depression, Religious Conflict, Team Bonding, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Torture, hurt!everybody, lots of angst but also lots of hugs and love?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 06:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26348767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BecauseWhateverAtAll/pseuds/BecauseWhateverAtAll
Summary: “And it’s enough?” Nile asks. “It’s enough to keep you going?”“It’s enough to make me love this world and so many of the people in it,” Joe says, soft but sure. “We can’t change evil. We can only try to end each day having come out on top of it, and hopefully having helped others do the same. It may never go away, but other, better things aren’t ever going away either. That’s so much more important. Vital. That’s what I’d want you to remember, if you can.”When you have a seemingly infinite number of days ahead of you, some will turn out well and some won't. And sometimes you can’t tell which is which until the day is over. Nile gets to experience the whole gamut with each of her new family members while finding her way through this weird, wonderful immortal life.Chapter 1: Nile and QuynhChapter 2: Nile and BookerChapter 3: Nile and NickyChapter 4: Nile and JoeChapter 5: Nile and Andy
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Nile Freeman & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Nile Freeman & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Nile Freeman & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 147
Kudos: 292





	1. What’s the Use In Half A Story, Half A Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Heyyyyyy so I was writing kinda abstractly, just a conversation between Joe and Nile (spoiler for chapter 4, I guess), but it kept growing and growing and here we are. Some character study of the different sides, good and bad, of each character, through their relationships with Nile. AKA, warning: each chapter has 2 stories, one that ends not-happy and one that ends happy. I think. Or hope. Both? Both. Both is good. 
> 
> (Story title is from the Prince song “America,” chapter title is from the Prince song "The Ladder.")

_1\. Le Havre, February 28, 2021_

  
The situation is officially FUBAR. A clusterfuck whose cluster is getting more fucked by the minute.

“We can’t ever- _ever_ \- split up again,” she spits the words at nobody in particular, though the action does help get some of the blood out of her mouth.

This is not how the mission is supposed to be happening. Joe is supposed to distract the henchmen, Nicky is supposed to free the trafficking victims, Nile is supposed to free Booker, and Andy is supposed to have her epic Confrontation Song showdown with Quynh. 

She’s not sure where or when it all went to shit, but there’s an awful lot of gunfire and yelling happening above this basement. And inside, Nile is strapped to a wall with a knife sticking in her gut. And Quynh is standing in front of her, now sans knife. There’s blood on Quynh’s dress, a lot of blood. Hers, good guys’, bad guys’, Nile has no idea. Her comprehension might be a little cloudy at the moment, considering she’s got a shitload of blood covering her clothes too. Which is definitely hers.

“Fuck you, by the way,” she adds as an afterthought.

But Quynh responds by yanking the knife out of her stomach pretty sharply, so maybe she wins this round.

“Fuck!” she yells this time, even though she knows it’s not loud enough to be heard over the fight going on outside. “Fucking… fuck… you.”

Quynh comes to stand very close in front of her. She’s shorter than Nile, much shorter. But feels twelve feet tall. “Oh, you’re definitely one of Andromache’s, aren’t you?”

She does her best not to grimace at the feeling of internal organs stitching back together. “Yeah, well, so are you, aren’t you?”

The knife slashes wide across her chest. Not deep, but long and painful. “Very confident in the face of an enemy. But that is the folly of youth, isn’t it?”

“Maybe it’s more that I was told you weren’t the enemy,” she grits her teeth. “That you were their family.”

“How sentimental,” Quynh sneers, beautiful and ugly all at once. “And for you to believe it, it must have been the boys who fed you that nonsense.” She reaches out and flicks at the tear in Nile’s shirt, sees the skin underneath is healed, and slashes again. Same spot. “Let me guess, Nicolò fed you some earnest lines about mercy and guilt, Yusuf told you a story about all of us from back in the day that ends with both of them nobly hiding their tears. Hmm? Am I close?”

She glares again, because sometimes it’s not hiding tears, sometimes it’s Nicky growing very quiet, too quiet, unable to talk for the rest of the day. Or it’s Joe excusing himself mid-story to go for a walk, no one sure whether to follow him or leave him be. Sometimes they’re fine, but Andy overhears and starts drinking like she’s still immortal and they have a frantic race to find all the hidden bottles in the safe house before she does. 

And sometimes those are the good days.

And ever since three weeks ago when Nile’s dreams had changed, ever since they lost track of Booker, and Copley had come to them in a frenzy with news of some other immortal, Did they know there was another woman like them? and Did they know what business she was involved in?, there hadn’t really been any good days.

“If you know them so well,” she says with her jaw clenched, “the fuck are you doing? They- they _love_ you, they-”

Quynh slashes her again. “That’s all a very nice lie they’re selling you, honey. You think anything we touch actually lasts that long? You think they’ll love _you_ till their dying day? You think you’ll love _them?”_

“Yes,” she yells it, partly to distract herself from the pain. “I do!”

“ _No_ ,” her voice goes the opposite, soft, nearly a whisper, and both she and the knife are in Nile’s face. “They love you when it’s an easy thing, when it’s some morally good, justifiable thing. But forever? They-”

“‘Easy?’ You spent hundreds, thousands of years with them, and you think anything they’ve been through since losing you has been easy?” Nile can’t help it how wide her eyes go. 

Quynh is way too still. It isn’t frozen, it's a viper getting ready to strike. “What _they’ve_ been through?”

And Nile is way too late in realizing that mistake. “Oh shit-” And there went the knife again. 

“All their talk of morality and justice,” Quynh yanks the knife back out. “Only works if the world is morally just. And it’s not. Look around. Kill or be killed. If you want to stay alive, stay on top, you-”

“Seriously?” Nile winces, tries not to rush her breathing as wounds heal up. Again. At this rate, she’s going to hyperventilate a lung right out of her mouth. “You’re gonna go with the law-of-the-jungle spiel right now? We’re fucking immortal, the whole ‘be killed’ thing is kinda-”

Quynh just up and slaps her this time. Which, hey, no blood loss, so yay. “Your beautiful little family, fighting for what’s right. That’s what you think, yes? That’s what this whole thing is about, this ‘fucking immortality.’ No jungle, just good guys stopping bad guys, hmm?”

Nile slows her breathing as best she can (kind of okay), squares up as best she can (not quite as much), and meets her eyes. “Yes.”

Quynh smiles, and Nile hates it because it’s furious and weary and wild and _knowing_ , and she doesn’t even know what it is Quynh _knows_. “Then I’m the bad guy, honey. This is my world. Who I am.”

“But-”

“Andromache, the boys, you? Good guys. It’s your job to try to stop someone like me. So how do you stop someone like me from doing what I do…” she swipes again across Nile’s chest, a little deeper.

Somewhere in the back of Nile’s mind, even as she lets out a little bit of a scream this time, she worries about her bra strap getting cut, and worries about replacing it, because she really likes this bra, it was really hard to find. It fit on the first try, that’s about as miraculous as anything else she’s experienced in the last year.

Quynh shakes her head, focused on that slash she keeps making. “Kill or be killed. Simple as that. There’s no room in this for love.”

“No-”

“They have to stop me. And to do that? They have to not love me.” Another slash. “It’s a wonderfully fun catch twenty-two, Nile. Either they love me and fail to stop me- fail to protect others, fail their mission- or they find some way to kill me. Thereby failing me and themselves. Not exactly a win-win, is it?”

“No.”

It’s a new voice, and Nile has been so caught in this basement bubble she’d actually forgotten the rest of the team was still around somewhere. It’s quiet outside, no more sounds of battle. And yet it’s legitimately shocking to her (or maybe she’s actually going into shock?) to see Nicky at the bottom of the steps, entering the basement with his gun drawn. 

“You’re early, Nicolò,” Quynh doesn’t have that problem, apparently. “I thought it would’ve taken you longer to get the merchandise to safety. Well done. And you came here, so… you couldn’t find Yusuf? Or maybe he’s with our friend Booker, so you wondered where Nile was. Maybe that’s it.”

“Don’t do this, Quynh,” Nicky sounds steady, looks steady, of course he does. He always does. But Nile can tell, she doesn’t even know how, that he’s shaken. He’s worried. “Please.”

She finally turns to face him, brandishing the knife that’s stained with Nile’s blood. “Ah, but you don’t know for sure, do you? You don’t know where the others are. You could be too late, you know.” She tucks the knife close to her, and unsheathes one of her long blades with her free hand. “Booker might still be trapped in one of those shipping containers, darling. I might have already put Andromache and poor, sweet Yusuf in little boxes of their own.”

“You haven’t,” Nicky says with confidence, eyes skipping over to Nile for just a moment, a reassurance. “You _wouldn’t_.”

“I wouldn’t?” She steps closer to Nicky, who keeps the gun up with one hand but reaches the other towards his own sword. “Of course I would. Why not? It’s survivable, Nicolo. Aren’t I living proof of that?”

“I don’t yet know if our Quynh survived,” he says through a clenched jaw.

She swipes at him, but only at half speed, and Nicky easily ducks out of the way. “That would be the greater fear for you, wouldn’t it?” Another seemingly half-hearted slash. “What if I do have him, hmm? And it takes you centuries to reunite?” Another swipe. She’s driving Nicky away from the stairs, away from the exit. He’s standing between her and Nile now. “He always was so open and trusting with me.” Another, but with so much more sudden speed and force, it takes Nicky by surprise, and she’s able to cut his hand open and knock the gun from it. “Will he still be so sweet by the time you find him again?” 

He spits something in his own language and draws his sword, parrying when she strikes at him again. Nile can only look on with worry- Nicky’s sword is heavy and long, it’s meant for battles and melees, not duels like this. And she has no clue what Quynh’s endgame is here, how she plans on winning. Or losing. 

“You’re doing this on purpose,” Nile knows she’s thinking out loud, but she can’t stop herself. She has to stop Quynh, she has to stop this conversation, has to help Nicky. “You’re trying to make us hate you. So you don’t have to-”

Her old friend the stabby-knife is back, Quynh casually hurling it in her direction. More accurately, the direction of her face. “No!” Nicky spins at the last second, ignoring Quynh’s attack this time, letting her slash his shoulder open, in order to knock the knife off trajectory with his sword. Which saves one of Nile’s lives, but leaves Nicky wide open to another attack.

“Don’t-!” she yells out helplessly, desperately, unable to do anything but watch (Quynh is making sure she can _see_ , making sure she _knows_ how purposeful, evil this is), as Quynh swings her blade down-

And it stops. Andy is there, breathing hard, her labrys blocking the stroke. She takes advantage of the surprise, shoving Quynh’s blade up and away, and Nicky rolls out from under it. Quynh doesn’t even notice, staring at Andy. 

Andy stares back. 

“Andromache.” For all that Nile had seen in her face before, Quynh is completely unreadable now. She looks Andy over, head to toe, slowly. Drinking her in, by the looks of it. 

Andy isn’t doing the same. Her face is set. Determined. “You’re not doing this, Quynh.” And then she continues in another language, one Nile doesn’t know.

But Quynh does. She flinches, and then almost seems to flinch again at having shown that bit of weakness. She reaches to her belt and pulls the second blade hanging there, points one each at Nicky and Andy. “This is how it has to be, Andromache. Make your peace with it, because there will be none made with me.”

And then she attacks.

To Nile, stuck against the far wall, it almost looks like a ballet. Three of them whirl around each other, striking, deflecting, trying to find an upper hand. Nile remembers Joe’s first description of Quynh, and has to admit it does her justice. She’s incredible, fluid, vicious, at one with her blades in a way Nile has never seen before, not even with the rest of the team. The two-against-one keeps her from doing too much damage, but she’s not tiring out.

But neither are Nicky and Andy, the determination to see this through lending a little more strength to their movement. Quynh screams in frustration as Andy ducks under a swing and her blade hits the wall, ringing almost like a gunshot through the basement. Nile winces at the sound, the echoing ring in her ears, but the other three don’t even notice.

But other people do.

The noise has finally caught the attention of Quynh’s hired help, bringing a half dozen guards back into the room, and there’s nothing between them, their guns, and Andy. Her back is to them, and her focus is on Quynh.

“Nicky!” Nile yells over the sound of six guns being cocked and reloaded. “You have to-!”

But he’s busy too, stuck on the other side of Quynh, bleeding, fending off one of her swords, he won’t get to her in time, and Nile is stuck against the wall, and they’re pointing their guns at Andy, and _Andy is going to die right-_

There’s a thud, something sharp and rushed, moving at a frenzied pace above them, and then slabs of concrete and the industrial steel ceiling tiles over the guards drop down with a heavy crack, and two figures fall with them, landing hard on the floor. And on the guards. Nile tries to parse through dented metal and clouds of dust and blood and bone splinters- yep, that’s definitely a tibia just sticking up out in the air- but she can’t tell who’s hurt and how much.

Then one of the ceiling tiles gets flipped over, and Joe shoves Booker off the pile of carnage. Oh good. The tibia belonged to a bad guy, then. “Nile,” he wheezes, sounding like the air has been knocked out of him. “Get Nile.” And then, not getting up from his position on the floor, he rolls onto his other side and kicks out at one of the guards that’s managed to survive the onslaught.

Nile tries to keep track of everyone, Booker half crawling towards her on healing broken ankles, Nicky and Andy still striking and twisting away from Quynh’s attacks, Joe taking on the guards while flat on his back. But it’s a lot. A lot, a lot. Too much. She-

“Nile,” Booker is back to two good feet, a hand against her face. “You okay?”

She stares at him for a moment. He’s unshaven, pale, thinner, but (of course) completely healed of… of anything visible. “You okay?” she parrots back without thinking.

He smiles a little. “Well, now that we’ve established we’re both fine…” he has a fire axe in one hand, and makes quick work of the straps and chains holding her to the wall. And really, Nile really wants to ask what he and Joe were up to that they managed to get an axe and go crawling in some ceiling vents. But then all the blood rushes back to her hands with the sting of roughly 6 billion fire ants, and it’s a major victory that she remains conscious at all.

A shout from Nicky has them both turning, Nile reaching out even as Booker starts to hand over one of his guns to her. Nicky’s down, knocked hard to the floor by Quynh. He climbs up to his knees, shaking his head to clear it, even as Quynh leaps forward at Andy. Two blades and a labrys clang to the ground, and now it’s just a brawl.

It’s a clash of elbows, fists, yelling and gasping, both of them moving faster than Nile can track. She and Booker stumble over to Nicky, who’s trying to track Andy and Quynh and trying to call out to Joe who’s stuck on the other side of their fight, finishing off the last of the guards while still on his back. (Nile is just gonna go ahead and guess that he’s got fractured vertebrae fusing back together over there.)

Nicky gets to his feet when they reach him, hugs Nile to his side briefly, then readies himself, sword coming back up into an attack stance. The problem is, Andy and Quynh are fighting too fast and too vicious for them to step in, to get a clean shot, anything. They can’t risk Andy getting caught in the crossfire. 

And Andy clearly doesn’t give a fuck, with the way she’s throwing herself into the fight, a fierceness Nile hasn’t really seen in her since that fight to get out of Merrick’s lab. Giving as good as she gets, and there are bruises and blood flying fast between the two women.

But Andy’s mortal now, and Quynh isn’t, and after some twist of her torso and hips, she has Andy on her back, straddling her waist, hands at Andy’s throat. “Stop,” she hisses just loud enough for the others to hear. And they have to obey, of course they do. All of them. Nile stays next to Booker and Nicky, eyes wide. Quynh never even looks their way. She only looks at Andy, still so furious she’s almost shuddering with it. “What was your plan, Andromache? Did you think you’d _fix_ me? Convert me back to your ways? Make me forget the last five hundred years?”

Andy looks up at her calmly, that way she always is when she’s inches from death. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to.”

Quynh makes an almost inhuman sound, a snarl. “Look at you. Why would I want to come back to this, to-” she stops. Freezes. The rest of them do too. Quynh moves one hand to Andy’s collarbone, to a cut made by one of her own blades. “You’re bleeding?”

“Yeah,” Andy’s face gives nothing away. And Nile wants to scream, because _Andy_ should scream. Andy should scream at Quynh, and kick her ass, and do _something. Anything._

“You- you’re…” Quynh stares at the cut, traces the blood. “When?”

“Last year.” Andy could easily fight back, Nile knows. Get free, roll to the side- either side, to her and Nicky and Booker or to Joe- but she doesn’t. She watches Quynh.

“You’re mortal,” she sounds small, disbelieving. “You’re dying. You’re _dying_. Why would you come here, Andromache? Why would you- why are you here? What's wrong with you?” She punches lightly at the cut, not even enough to hurt, but it’s enough for the rest of them to move forward.

And immediately stop when Andy holds one hand up a few inches off the ground. _Back off._ Her focus is still on Quynh. “You know why, Quynh. I know you do.” 

Quynh shakes her head, and her hand moves from the wound to the center of Andy’s chest, where her necklace is just visible. And she stutters again, touching the pendant.

And Nile suddenly wonders where the necklace came from.

Quynh looks at the necklace, then back at Andy. Both of them breathing hard, and breathing in time with each other, and Nile still kinda wants to scream or kinda wants to cry. Quynh’s hand goes for Andy’s throat again, but even as Nile, Booker, and Nicky take another step forward, all she does is grab the necklace, yank it free, then stumble to her feet.

She would have rushed out of the basement right then and there, but the ceiling tile massacre is in her way. Joe is in her way. He props himself up to almost sitting (definitely a broken back then, probably just finished healing) as she gets close, and looks her in the eye with everything he has. _So open and trusting_ , like Quynh had said. “Quynh-?”

She strikes hard with her elbow, catching him across the cheek, knocking him onto his back again. He lets her. And without a look back at any of them, at Andy, she flees up the stairs and is gone.

It’s completely, impossibly silent for a few seconds. Then Andy breaks the spell by climbing to her knees with a quiet groan. Nicky is the next to move, re-sheathing his sword on his way over to Joe, and then Booker, reaching for Andy’s elbow and helping her stand.

Andy takes a few deep breaths, wiping blood off her lips, glancing around at the absolute chaos that used to be the basement of an evil lair. “I’m giving you a 2.5 for the dismount,” she calls over to Joe, nodding at Booker.

Joe, still lying flat, eyes closed, holds up a fist in victory. “Distracted the henchman _and_ rescued Booker. Two jobs in one. Bam.” He only opens his eyes when Nicky grabs the raised fist and hauls him up to his feet, and the two of them do a quick pat down of each other, looking for injuries and inventory at the same time.

Nile grips her gun, wiggling her fingers, testing that she has full strength back in her hands. “We going after her?” She’s already starting for the exit, for the chase.

“No.”

Nile spins back around. Andy is bending slowly, definitely sore, to pick up her labrys and tuck it into the strap on her back. She doesn’t look at any of them. “What?”

“No,” Andy waves a hand, exhausted. “We’re done. She’s done.” She leans over again, picks up Quynh’s discarded blades. “It’s over.”

“How can it be over?” Nile can’t stop herself, the aches and pains from the ordeal still fresh in her mind. “She’s, she’s still…” She looks to the guys for help, but they have taken their cues from Andy (and always will) and are standing down. 

Nicky and Joe start leaning into each other, heads tilted and pressed together. Nicky is brushing dust and debris out of Joe’s hair while Joe sadly examines the rip in Nicky’s sleeve with a soft, “oh, I liked this shirt,” just barely heard. Booker sighs long and deep, runs a hand through his own disheveled hair, stows his gun at his lower back and holds a hand out to Nile. He directs his gaze at the gun in her hand, then looks back up at her. 

She can only hold it tighter. “No. No, after what she did to you? Me? All of us?” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Nicky trace light fingertips against the bruise already fading from Joe’s cheek. The cuts Nicky got from Quynh’s sword are long gone. As are Nile’s wounds by now. As is anything that happened to Booker that she bets he won't ever tell her about if sober. As is Quynh altogether. _No_.

“Nile,” Andy is in front of her now, way too calm and stoic for all the shit that just went down. “She made her choice. She’s done.” She looks over at Joe and Nicky again, and they hold a quick, silent conversation. Then Andy turns back to Nile. “The only way we’re going to find her now is when she wants to be found. Or wants to find us.”

“To do this again?” Nile waves at herself, at Booker, at the mash up of ceiling tiles and bodies at their feet. 

“No,” Nicky answers. “To say goodbye.” He looks tired, he looks resigned. Not at peace with what’s going on, but obviously willing himself to come to some sort of acceptance. Joe still just looks sad, eyes going back and forth between Nicky and Andy like one of them might give him a clue on how any of this is okay. And Nile wants to hate Quynh all over again for running out on them, making them look like this.

Nile’s hands start shaking as soon as she hands the gun back over to Booker. They don’t stop shaking as she follows the team out of the bunker, across the docks to their getaway boat, up the coastline to another dock, a car, a safe house. As Andy pulls Booker into another room, and they talk in low voices, and Booker _cries_. As the adrenaline wears off and Nicky has to half-carry Joe to bed so his spine can finish healing. Her hands shake for the rest of the night. Because she realizes Quynh was right.

There was no way to win this one.

They failed.

  
***

_2\. Bowen Island, April 9, 2028_

  
The job in Vancouver has been so completely, easily done that it was almost mundane. Nile is still pretty shocked they hadn’t even had to revert to Plan B at any point, and- okay- is maybe a little smug in pointing that out. Since Plan A had been her idea and all.

She grins happily at Andy’s eye roll, Nicky’s proud smile, Booker’s hand squeezing her shoulder, Joe’s literal singing of her praises (he’s been in a music mood all this year with no sign of stopping)- all of them reveling in something going so well as they hike up the trail to the pretty little cottage they’ve rented for the week. 

Andy enters first, looking back over her shoulder as she tries to convince Joe and Nicky one more time that it’s too early in the year for a whale watching tour, and so it’s Booker and Nile who see the shadow of someone waiting for them inside before she does.

Nile almost yells her name in warning as they hurtle into the cottage to stand between Andy and danger, but she stops at the last second- she’s learning. No identification, no names, just in case this is someone out to get them, someone like-

They’re all in their horizontal wave formation within seconds, weapons drawn, but no one moves to attack. Nile because she’s waiting for a signal, and the others because they don’t seem sure how.

Quynh is standing in the middle of the room. No weapon, no cover, nothing. Her arms are at her sides, though Nile can see one hand is almost anxiously playing with the cuff of her sweater. Her hair is pulled back simply. She isn’t wearing any makeup, no fancy clothes, no high heels. No cover there, either.

Nile can see the leather cord of Andy’s necklace- Quynh’s necklace?- under her collar.

Quynh looks at each of them in turn, at each weapon pointed in her direction, but even as she does, it’s obvious all her attention is on Andy. And vice versa.

“Well?” Andy asks, and there’s a slight shake to her voice.

“I-” Quynh shifts on her feet, as though about to take a step forward, stops. “I want to speak with you.”

“About?”

“About- I…” Quynh holds her hands up and out, like in supplication. “ _Please_ , Andromache. Andy. I want to speak with you.”

Andy doesn’t speak for awhile, just watching Quynh. Nile knows she’s had Copley running extra surveillance searches for her ever since Le Havre. She knows Andy has been leaving messages in random safe houses, all the ones she’s had for over five hundred years. She knows Joe and Nicky have gone off on a few quick searches of their own- Vietnam, Greece, a few places Sub-Saharan. All for nothing. No word, no signal from Quynh until now.

Nile thinks it's almost been worse for them this way, knowing she was out in the world, breathing, living, and still unable to find her. It’s not fair that she just gets to show up now, when she feels like it. When they’d been feeling victorious, relaxed. Happy.

Andy definitely doesn’t look happy now, exchanging a long look with Joe and Nicky, who ultimately nod their agreement with whatever she's thinking. She turns back to Quynh. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to sit there,” she points with her gun to a chair near the middle of the room, facing away from the exit. “And you’re going to talk. Just like you want. Joe and Nicky will be right here to listen.” She waves Nile and Booker towards the door. “And the rest of us are going to make sure you haven’t brought any friends with you.”

Andr-”

Nile doesn’t spare a glance at her, dutifully following Andy out the door, Booker right behind them. “Are you sure they’ll be okay with her?” she asks quietly once they’re far enough away in the yard.

“Yeah,” Andy draws the word out slowly, tiredly. And, to Nile’s surprise, puts her gun away. “I told you back then, she’s done. Made her choice.”

“But then why...?” she catches Booker’s slight warning head shake, and that’s when she realizes. Andy hasn’t walked out to punish Quynh, or because she doesn’t trust her. It’s because she’s not ready. “Oh. Yeah. Okay.”

Andy gets that smile on her face she only seems to get around Nile. “I figure you two probably don’t need to talk to her either, so…”

“Got that right,” Booker grimaces, but his eyes are calm, understanding, as he looks Andy over. He stows his gun at his back, nods his thanks.

Nile does the same. “What do you want to do?”

Andy shakes her head. “I’m going for a walk. You guys can do whatever, just don’t…” she glances at the cottage. All appears quiet and still inside. “Don’t stray too far.” And then she’s gone, disappearing into the woods surrounding them.

Nile silently counts to ten in her head, dragging out the ‘Mississippi’ between each number. Then looks to Booker. “Maybe someone should-”

He smiles. “I’ll give it another minute and follow. Just in case. Don’t worry about it.”

“Sure. Yeah. Her crazy ex-girlfriend who tortured both of us is chilling in the rented living room we had to put a security deposit on, but yeah. No worries,” she blows out a deep breath.

Booker shrugs. “Okay, some worries.” He looks back in the direction Andy went, then smiles at her again, echoes Andy’s words. “Don’t stray too far.” And then he’s off, shadowing the boss.

Nile looks around for a moment, completely lost. It’s beautiful outside, everything green and crisp and blooming, and very much in contrast to the supervillain who showed up in their cottage and is saying God-knows-what to her brothers. They’re together, though, she reminds herself. They’ll be fine.

She picks a random direction, away from Andy, away from _Quynh_ , and starts walking. She finds a trail after a few minutes, taking her up and back behind the clearing, just high enough that she can’t see the cottage anymore. The trees thin out some, and she finds a little rocky outcrop looking out onto the bay and even farther. She makes a note to tell the guys later, in case they want to try whale watching from here.

And then… then, Nile does nothing. For a good long while, she sits, eyes half-closed, tuning her ears and her breaths to the world around her. Joe and Nicky had offered to let her join them in meditation a few years ago, and it hadn’t taken her very long at all to dive in, just like she does with weapons and languages and anything else her team is willing to teach her. She’s noticed in the last year that time is starting to lose its relativity to her former life, and now she can easily fill thirty, sixty minutes just centering herself, basking in the surroundings, the inner, the-

There are footsteps behind her, and they aren’t any she recognizes. She comes out of her mind quickly, whipping around, hand straying close to where she has her gun-

And the sight of Quynh approaching doesn’t exactly make her stand down. Nile narrows her eyes, watches suspiciously as Quynh comes closer but stops out of reach. She looks Nile over, with a very different air about her than she’d had back in that basement. Her face scrunches up for just a second, indecisive, and then she points to the ground next to Nile. “May I?”

Nile doesn’t answer at first. Can’t. Because, y’know, what the fuck. But Quynh is still… kinda… fidgety? is Nile’s best guess? And while her instincts aren’t quite as honed as the others, she doesn’t sense any real, immediate danger. So she pulls her gun out, keeps it visible on her lap, and then nods.

Quynh smiles a little at the gun, and sits down cross-legged, mirroring Nile’s meditation pose whether she means to or not. She faces out at the vista, takes in the view.

“Where are Joe and Nicky?” she asks. Tries not to make it sound like a demand, but it still comes out a little accusatory.

“Giving their verdict to Andromache, I assume.” At the look on Nile’s face, “They’re fine. It was just talk.”

Nile isn’t quite sure she believes her, but she doesn’t _not_ believe her either. “And you’re up here, because…”

“Because I’m not sure I’m ready to hear the verdict,” she smiles a little painfully. “Or ready for her to tell me to leave.”

She doesn’t let herself react to the honesty in Quynh’s tone, because there’s a part of her that doesn’t want it to _be_ honesty. Instead she quirks one eyebrow, imitating Joe’s as best she can. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have come at all.”

The smile turns into a smirk, but not an angry one. “You know, I wish we’d met five hundred years ago, Nile.”

It shocks her into silence. 

Quynh waits a bit before continuing. “But I’m glad you showed up when you did. I’m glad you don’t know me from before, or trust me.” She nods at the gun.

Nile makes no move to put it away. “Why?”

“Because I don’t trust me either. Not yet, at least. That- that madness, the ocean,” she looks out at the bay again. “It’s still… lurking. I'm glad you're looking out for the others.”

“How can you stand it?” she bursts out, forgetting herself, forgetting the circumstances. “How can you look at the water or be near it after five hundr- shit, how can you even take a _bath_ after all that?”

Quynh doesn’t seem upset by the questions, at least. She’s still looking out at the water, like it’s a challenge, an ultimate staring contest. “Because I don’t let anything win against me if I think I can beat it.”

Which, okay, admittedly, a pretty badass answer. While also walking that fine line between good guy and supervillain. Great. 

“I am trying, you know. Not to let it beat me.”

“I know,” because she does. Who knows what actually evens the score between good and bad at the end of all things, but Copley has been tracking Quynh as well as he can since she ditched them in France. Not everything, because even five hundred years out of practice, Quynh is good at the whole secret vigilante thing, but since running out of that bunker she’s been slowly trying to right her scale back to the good side of things. 

“Also, I take showers now.”

It’s a good joke, and something she’s definitely used to with the sense of humor she’s been exposed to (or stuck with, depending on her mood) with this group, but it still strikes her as extremely sad. “I’m sorry,” she offers tentatively, because no matter what, Quynh has been a part of this family and still means so much to Andy. To Nicky and Joe, too.

“Oh,” Quynh waves a hand, waves the words away. “It’s not- It just is. One of the prices to pay for this life, maybe.” Quieter, “For as long as I have it.” Then, with another hand wave. “I know I need to get better. We don’t have the luxury of time.”

Nile studies her, still can’t get a bead on her, and it’s frustrating. Unsettling. Not in a this-chick-is-evil-and-might-eat-my-face kind of unsettling, but still. Unpredictable. “Is that what you told the guys?”

“‘The guys,’” Quynh shakes her head, laughs a little through her nose as though trying to contain it. As though laughing out of genuine pleasure is something unfamiliar. “It’s- I’m sorry, I know I’ve missed so much of their lives. I know they were already men when they first died, but they were such first-bloom-in-spring babies when we met them. It's hard for me to see them as anything else.”

It’s not the answer to her question, but holy _crap_ does she want to know more about this. “They’d already been alive like a hundred years by then, right? Something like that?”

Quynh thinks about it, shrugs. “Roughly. You don’t know this story?”

“Some of it,” Nile shrugs right back. “But only from their perspective. And they tend to gloss over anything angsty in the ‘how I met my immortal family’ genre.” For Andy’s sake, and maybe Booker's, and maybe for theirs too. They're well-adjusted now, but Nile is pretty sure there was maybe a forty-gallon bag of issues about the Crusades for awhile. “Andy’s not really the reminiscing-type, so most stories I get are from Joe and Nicky. Mostly Joe.”

“So all the joyful stories. Romantic, heroic, epic.”

Nile thinks back to a few years ago, their awful-then-wonderful trip to Wales, the words shared one night as they sat together shoulder-to-shoulder. “Not always.”

Quynh contemplates that, sees something in Nile’s face that maybe gives her the right impression, and moves on. “We used to call them the kitten and the puppy behind their backs.”

Her brain just straight-up flatlines. “...What.” _Oh my God, yes._

“Nicolò with that quiet curiosity and turn-out-of-nowhere fierceness, Yusuf with that bouncing want for love and to give whatever he can. Him doing what he could to get us to trust them, Nicolò doing what he could to decide if _they_ should trust _us_. They were a handful. Exhausting. Contemplated more than once just carrying them around in a basket at my hip until they settled down.”

She files that away for later, both for the teasing potential and the contemplation of just how much chaos they would have wreaked if she, Nicky, and Joe were all newbies at the same time. Yikes. “Were they already in love when you met?” Nile settles a little easier, lets some more of her nerves drain away.

“They were already in love when _they_ met,” Quynh rolls her eyes, but the contrast between the scorn Nile had seen in her last time and the fondness now is so striking. “But yes. Foolishly, hopelessly…” she pauses, a small smile, “wonderfully in love. They were both very sweet. With each other, with us, with anyone we helped. Gentled all the sharp edges Andromache and I had shaped ourselves into. And they should thank every deity in existence that they were already warriors, otherwise Andromache wouldn’t have been able to put up with them those first few years.”

“Were you and Andy in love then?” she dares to ask next.

Quynh is silent, staring out at the mountains, the water. Then she nods, just a fraction of an inch. “Foolishly, hopelessly.”

“Wonderfully,” Nile adds, because she feels like she has to. Like she needs to.

Quynh says nothing, and they fall into silence. Nile finds herself breathing in time with the quiet echoes of the waves hitting the rocks below them. It’s almost like meditating again, and isn’t that pretty damn surreal, finding some sort of peace sitting next to a woman who once tortured her and almost ruined her favorite bra?

“With Lykon,” Quynh speaks up so suddenly that Nile almost flinches. “It happened all at once. Fast. He was suddenly mortal, and then he was dead. Just like that.”

“That sounds pretty awful,” she says, feeling stupid the moment it comes out.

Quynh nods, but doesn’t seem like she’s actually agreeing. “We didn’t have time to really say goodbye. To tell him we loved him one more time.” She glares down at the rocks beneath them, but it’s so controlled and anguished that it looks nothing like the Quynh of seven years ago. “But we also didn’t have it looking us in the face every day.”

Nile swallows hard against the feelings lodged in her throat. The fear she shares with Quynh, the uncertainty. Regret for something unnameable, because none of them have a choice in this. Mortality, immortality, any of it. “If-” she clears her throat, tries again. “If I was more like Andy, I’d probably say, ‘tough shit, because this _is_ happening, whether any of us want to face it or not.’”

She tries to laugh again. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re not her, then.”

“Yeah,” Nile maybe tries to laugh too. Maybe almost succeeds. 

“Quynh.”

They both turn at Andy’s voice. She’s standing just at the top of the trail, hands in the pockets of her jacket. Her face looks as unreadable as ever, but her eyes… her eyes seem clear. Maybe even a little soft. Nile looks past her and can make out a shadow in the woods a few meters behind, and two more figures making their way up from the bottom of the trail. 

Quynh isn’t looking at the guys, though. She’s only looking at Andy. Nile glances back and forth between them, unsure if she should stay, leave, do anything to break the silence.

Andy’s head dips down for a second, like she’s drawing the strength to breathe, to speak again. Then she looks up, takes another breath, and smiles. “Come take a walk with me?”

Quynh is startled, visibly, for a moment. Then reaches out, tentative, and touches Nile's forearm gently. Whether it's a thank you, an apology, a signal that it's okay for her to put the gun away, Nile doesn't know. So she stays still, quiet, watches as Quynh stands up, way more gracefully than Nile probably will. Quynh's and Andy's eyes are still locked together. They don’t seem to notice Booker emerge from the trees and head back to the cottage, passing by Nicky and Joe who slide politely around the women to come to sit with Nile.

There’s a hint of another smile, another nod, and Andy and Quynh walk off together.


	2. You Can Live Your Own Life And I’ll Live Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starring Nile & Booker. Warnings for: brief mention of self-harm and alcohol abuse in the first story, and a very very very vague reference to suicide ideation in the second story. And reiterating the theme of the stories, just in case, because while Booker isn't doing so well in the first part, it gets better!
> 
> (Chapter title is from the Prince song “Just as Long as We’re Together.”)

_1\. Paris, August 30, 2020_

  
In the end, she decides trying to sneak around would be stupid. So instead she drops a casual, “Hey, I think I’m gonna hit the road for a few days, cool?” to each of them separately, and hopes for the best.

She kinda succeeds. Nicky just asks, slight concerned, if everything’s okay, and when she says yes, he goes about preparing some snacks for her trip. Which- hell yeah. His concept of trail mix is ridiculous- it involves _truffles_ \- but it’s so damn good that she doesn’t care. All Joe does is give her a confident, warm “Of course,” and then, as a second thought, “Call us if the road hits back!” because she now knows he _likes_ it when she rolls her eyes at him.

It’s Andy, of course, that she’s nervous about. Her only response is, “Where?” 

But Nile knew that was coming, so she readies herself when she says, “Paris.” And she really wants to do this, has had her mind made up for days, so she holds steady and still while Andy gives her one of those hard, unreadable looks.

And then totally betrays herself by sighing in relief when Andy nods. “Check in once a day.” She pauses, then adds in a rush, “Just to let us know you’re safe. Whatever business you have is your own.” Meaning she’s not going to ask. Meaning Nile doesn’t have to worry about telling the truth or a lie or upsetting the guys. Meaning nobody is going to stop her.

It’s just shy of too-easy to track Booker down, but since she did it through the methods he’d taught her, she decides it’s more poetic justice than concerning.

She shoulders her backpack decisively, takes a deep breath, and knocks. It takes like three seconds too long for the door to open, and she can’t decide if it’s because he’d known it was her and hesitated, or because he’s hungover out of his mind.

“Oh, fuck me,” he sighs, leaning his head against the open door.

“You look like _shit_ ,” she keeps her voice light and breezy, pushing past him to walk into the apartment. “Did you shower in gin this morning?” _Or at all?_

“What are you doing here, Nile?”

“Making sure you drink a glass of water every eight hours,” she drops her bag on the floor next to the couch and sits gingerly at first, testing that there’s nothing gross on it, then flopping back with a forced casualness. “Hungry? We could go get some dinner after you sober up.”

Booker is still standing at the door. It’s still open, and he’s still leaning against it. “What are you doing here?” he repeats.

She raises both eyebrows, sticks her head forward like the answer is obvious. Because it fucking is. “Visiting.”

He sighs, pushes his hair back from his face. “And whose idea was that?”

“Mine. They don’t even- I told Andy I was coming to Paris, but that’s it. Nobody even-”

“They didn’t ask where you were going, how long you’d be gone, what precautions you were taking?” Booker finally shuts the door, but goes back to leaning against it like he needs the balance. “No offers to come with you?”

“No, why would-” Well shit. Nicky and Joe hadn’t even been there when she’d left this morning, having gone off for a walk at sunrise. “Shit, okay, maybe, yeah.” They hadn’t asked specifics, because they hadn’t wanted her to feel like she had to lie or worry about them. Jesus, those dorks.

“Mm-hmm.” Booker smiles, hand rubbing at his jaw. “Don’t worry, they’ll find a way to get whatever intel they want out of you when you get back.”

“I’m not here to gather intel or say anything to them,” she glares. “I’m here to see how you’re doing.”

“And they don’t want to see me.” He moves over to the kitchen table, sits down with a thump, tilting his head back to the ceiling. “A win-win.”

She takes a moment to calm herself, breathe slowly. “So what? I wanted to come see you. I’m here. That’s a win too, isn’t it?”

She can actually see him rein it all in, and his face softens until he almost looks like the man she first met. “It is, Nile, it is.” And then he goes and ruins it by grimacing once more. “I'm just surprised they let you. There are supposed to be rules in a proper banishment, you know."

Okay, one more moment to calm herself, breathe slowly. Again. “You know, I thought when I came here you’d be all depressed and self-recriminating, not depressed and self-pitying. And it's not a banishment. It's more a... strategic time-out.” She almost wants to say 'conscious uncoupling' but she doesn't think he'd understand- or appreciate- the reference.

“I should be grateful, is what you’re saying, to get another reminder of how shit everything is? Or happy that the only one who dared to come was the one who doesn’t even know me?”

Maybe two moments. “If you need a reminder of anything, how about that we’re still thinking of you, that, that I-”

“That it’s my curse to live forever knowing both families I’ve ever had hate me?”

“That’s stupid,” she finds herself saying. “You’re being stupid.”

“Two hundred years of practice, Nile. Stupid led me here. Might as well just accept it.”

“Accept what?” she waves a hand around at the apartment seemingly held together by frayed string and stubborn French bitterness. “This isn’t permanent, Booker.”

“You can’t think after a hundred years I’ll be able to walk right back into that group and things will be fine.” Booker reaches behind him towards the sink (full of dishes, she can see) and grabs a clean (oh god, hopefully) glass and a bottle. He pours himself a drink. He doesn’t offer her one.

“Honestly? No. I think it’ll end up being closer to thirty-five or forty years, judging by the three sad faces I left this morning.” She stands, takes the glass from him, and goes back to her spot on the couch to drink it. “And fucking duh, of course it won’t be back to normal right away. But Jesus, Booker, it’s not supposed to be easy. It’s just not supposed to be forever, either.” Ugh, it is gin. She hates gin.

Booker apparently doesn’t, because he’s already got his own glass again. “You’ve gotten your hopes up about this trip, Nile. You think you can appeal to any sentimentality I have left and save me.”

“And you think you can piss me off enough that I’ll leave and never come back.” She raises her glass in a mock toast. “So let’s see who wins.” 

They make it all the way through dinner. Which is actually kinda impressive, when Nile looks back on it later, considering the gin before, the wine during, the brandy after. (If she hates gin? She _really_ hates brandy.) The little digs from him about the current situation are sandwiched between sincerity, genuinely caring how she’s doing, so she can ignore it for awhile.

And for awhile, Nile gets to pretend. Pretend they have Booker back, he never had to leave, he never did the stupid things that made him have to leave. She gets to joke with him again, listen to him explain the best countries to use for forged passports, about how she can improve her knife throwing, about exactly which coded subreddits to look up for help with pipe bombs and C4. You know, typical bonding.

They even go for a walk along the river. It’s nice. She manages to find ways to update him on how Andy’s doing through a whole lot of veiled complaints and whining. He manages to not ask about any of them. It sucks, but it works.

But then they’re back at his place, and back with his drinks and his crappy kitchen where everything in it is somehow the same non-color of gross beige, and she’s just about to ask if she should just crash here for the night, when he has to go and open his stupid, dumb mouth. Like a stupid, dumb man.

“So what happens in a couple months when you actually tell them you’re coming to see me, and they say no?”

“They won’t,” she says, because she knows that’s true. They might make faces, sure, and they’ll be quieter than normal, watch her closely, but they’d never forbid her from going. And- just as importantly- she wouldn’t put them in a position to. They're _all_ dealing with enough shit as it is.

“They don’t want you to see me, or talk to me, Nile.”

“No,” she takes his glass from him again, hopes it sticks this time. “That’s not it. _They_ don’t want to see you or talk to you. And that’s what you’re upset about. It’s what they’re upset about too. Because I can do this and they can’t.”

“Their choice,” he mutters, but at least he doesn’t go for another glass.

“You made some choices first, Booker,” she says softly, as kindly as she can. 

His eye twitches. He knows. But, you know, stupid. Dumb. So he glares across the room at nothing, purses his lips, keeps going. “They’re not suffering through this.”

“Yes they are.”

“Not like this. They’ve got each other.” And that’s whole crux of it for him, maybe always has been. Or maybe it’s just the mask for something deeper running through him. Because Joe and Nicky have their bond, and Andy- from what she can tell- had Quynh in the same way. And he didn’t get that immortal soul mate, the woman he loved dead and gone, so maybe he thinks he’s not… good enough for one. 

Which sucks, and she aches for him that much, but also...

“You’ll have them too, in a little while,” she keeps her voice low, even. “And anyway, just because they have each other doesn’t mean they have less hurt. And you took your hurt out on them, Booker. That’s part of the issue.”

He’s acting indifferent, and doing an impressive job- he’s trained in subterfuge after all- but she knows better. Because she _knows_. “They don’t-”

“Joe has nightmares,” she tosses it out in front of him like a grenade. “Either he doesn’t sleep or we hear him...” sometimes a shout, sometimes the stumble of footsteps to the nearest bathroom to throw up. And Nile hates herself a little bit that lately she’s started sleeping through it. Like she’s getting _used_ to it. Or Joe is, and he’s learned how to keep it quiet. Either option sucks. 

“We all have-”

“Do you know how hard it is to enforce the bedtime of a nine hundred year old man when he doesn’t want to sleep? When he’s scared to?” She crosses her arms, glares harder at his attempt to remain indifferent. “He won’t even listen to Andy about it, and she yelled at him. He didn’t even _respond_ to her.”

Booker’s eye twitches again.

“Nicky still listens to her. And thank God for that, because when we found out last week that he’s been cutting his and Joe’s hands every morning to make sure they’re still immortal, it took an order from Andy to get him to stop.” She hadn’t yelled then, but she had cried. It’d been way worse.

“Why?” he mumbles. “It’s logical, in a way. No harm done.” He looks like he doesn’t even believe it as he says it. He looks nauseous.

“No harm? They were re-torturing themselves every morning for two months.” She’s pretty sure Nicky is still fucked up from it, from the trauma of whatever they went through in that lab and the worry that if their secret was out to one group it might be out to others. Plus the fear from not being able to check their hands anymore (because he’d do anything for Andy right now), _plus_ -plus the guilt that Joe had been letting him do it every morning without complaint because he knew Nicky needed to. 

“It’s…” he sighs. “They’ll figure it out, bounce back. They’ll even out. Always do.”

“And what about me?” hating that her voice cracks, she plows ahead anyway. “You were… those first few days, you were the anchor for me. You were- what am I supposed to do?”

“Nile-”

“I need someone who remembers what it’s like to be new at this. Who’s still figuring it out too. Who can translate what a look in Andy’s eyes means, or what’s about to happen if Nicky starts muttering in Latin, or if I get up in the middle of the night and find Joe burning pages of a notebook.”

“It’s not your job to-”

“It’s not a job. I love them, Booker, and we’re in this together. And- and I need someone to tell me how to feel about _me_. How do I figure out all this? And the dreams? Jesus, how do I cope with those?”

“You have to give it time,” Booker shrugs, and the look on his face is as close to the one she first met, she could really very much cry at how much she’s missed it. “All of it. All of it comes with time.”

“You didn’t give it time,” she snaps at him, not out of anger at him really, just at… at everything. “And we don’t have time, now. Andy’ll be dead by then.” No twitch this time, he full-on flinches. Reaches for the bottle, but it’s empty at long last. He stands to go for another one, and she stands too, fast, throwing a hand out. “Don’t.” 

“Andy’ll be dead by the time I’m allowed back. Why not drink to her memory now?” he snaps in return. And grabs another bottle. “Might be the only chance I get.”

“You think they’d be that cruel? That we wouldn’t tell you or come get you if…?” She changes from ‘they’ to we.’ On purpose. Because she’s super subtle. And because she’s a part of all this now, even if she missed the first couple hundred of years. And she bonded with Booker and Andy those first few days, and she’s bonded with Joe and Nicky the last couple months, and… and everything is real fucked up.

And. Doesn’t. Have. To. Be.

“I don’t think there’s anyone who’s ever lived who knows how to hold a grudge like those three,” he glowers, back on the defensive.

“Yeah, well, I think ‘grudge’ might be a little simplistic for what they feel after being sold out by their brother and tortured. And if you don’t think they have a right to be, you’re more fucked up than I thought.” She feels bad for it, but not enough to not say it. “But, God, do they still love you, and you love them. I can see it after only a couple months. If you can’t, after two hundred years? You- you need to level out then, too.” 

He pushes past her still-outstretched arm, pulls out another bottle. “This is as level as I get.”

“That’s not true,” she remembers him at the pub in England, in mourning but accepting of his fate. What had changed since then? Or, maybe accepting is the wrong word. Maybe he’d just been resigned. “I know it’s not true. And I know you know better.” She tries to grab for the bottle, but he’s faster this time and keeps it out of her reach. “If you’re in a grieving stage right now, if you need to be this way- for now- that’s fine. Just- just give me some sign, man. That when the time comes, whenever that is, you’ll come back.”

“You want a sign?” He looks her dead in the eye, and she just _knows_ this is gonna be bad. “Here you go, Nile. I don’t want this life. You can have it, and you can have Andy and Joe and Nicky, and you can keep on saving the world all you want. And in two hundred years, you can realize what bullshit it all is, and how you’re going to be looking out at two hundred more, and two hundred after that, and maybe two thousand after that. And any good things you’ve had will be dead and rotted by then. And you won’t have it in you anymore to force yourself to go out yet again and find new good things, only to watch them rot all over again. So,” he uncorks the bottle, holds it up in a toast. “Fit that that on your fucking sign.”

She slaps him. It’s not enough to do any damage, or even knock the bottle from his hand, but she just needs… she needs the sound of it more than anything, weirdly. “You’re full of shit, and we both know it.”

He never breaks eye contact, raises his eyebrows, and pulls the bottle close to his mouth. “Your little contest from earlier? I think I win.” And it feels like he’s slapped her right back. 

“If you drink that, I’m leaving. I don’t think you’re a lost cause, Booker, none of us do, but I’m not going to try to help you until you can do some of the work yourself. So please. I’m- I’m begging you. Okay? Don’t drink that.”

There might be a little hesitation, or maybe Nile just wants there to be one, tells herself there is one, but by the time she’s let out one breath and drawn in the next, he’s got the bottle to his lips and seems determined to drink the whole thing in one go. 

She goes back to the couch, grabs her bag. “Okay.” Fumbling in it for a second, “Andy’s been holding onto this for you, seems as good a time as any to give it back.” Quixote, she thinks. Right now she can’t even read the spine of it through angry tears. “Here.” She shoves it into his chest, and he just lets it fall to the floor, still drinking. She doesn’t let her tears follow it to the carpet, keeps them in. “Okay.”

She turns to leave, pauses at the door. “We’ll try again in a couple months. Fuck you so much right now, Booker, but we’re not done.” And then she leaves, hurtling down the stairs to the street.

She’s upset, and frustrated that she didn’t make things better, and hurt, and so thrown off her game plan that she’s out of sorts, uncomfortable standing on the sidewalk outside his place. Something feels wrong. It feels like there are eyes on her, but a slightly tear-filled glance around reveals no one. She’s just off her game, maybe. And wants to go home. 

So she does.

It’s late when she gets back. The house is dark, and everything is very, very still. She drops her bag quietly inside the door and- on a hunch- heads for the couch. Joe is sitting there, notebook in hand, lit just enough by the moonlight through the windows that she can tell he’s writing tonight, not drawing. Nile guesses it’s about a fifty-fifty odds that he’s waiting up for her, or that he’s just up. 

At least he smiles peacefully, no hints of insomnia, when she sits next to him, though it fades a little when he sees her face. “Okay?” he keeps his voice at a whisper, even though the bedrooms are on the second floor. Maybe he just doesn’t want to spook whatever’s inside her.

She looks down at her hands, empty hands, and doesn’t answer.

He sets his book aside and shuffles over closer to her, a warm wall to her left after a very cold train ride. A very cold everything. “Did…” he pauses, studies her again. “How was the road?”

She shakes her head, feels everything- the frustration, the grief, the fear- start to well up, and tries to swallow it back down. Joe’s arm goes around her, his chin drops on top of her head, and only then does she let the tears fall. “It hit back.”  
  


***  
  


_2\. Thun, December 24, 2026_

  
It’s been so long since Nile has been in an apartment (“a safe flat,” Joe had proclaimed, waiting hopefully for her eye roll) as opposed to a cabin or house or cave, that she almost feels claustrophobic when they first settle in. Knowing there are other homes, other people, right on the other side of the walls- it’s stupid, of course, she grew up in apartments her entire life, then barracks… but still. They’re, like, _right there_. Mere mortals. Literally.

She decides it’s a good enough excuse for her restlessness. It’s that, and not the fifth person in their safe flat. It’s the first time they’ve been all five under one roof since… her first night as an immortal. 

And it’s _weird_ , is the thing.

Booker had chosen to go back to Paris on his own after the whole kidnapping ordeal with Quynh. He needed some time to recover and, more than that, Nile thinks (and Andy thinks, the one time they talked about it) he wanted to prove to himself that he could. She still doesn’t know what exactly went down between him and Quynh, but things definitely changed. In him, for him. 

He’d stayed in touch, too. Texts to Andy and Nicky, things that made her genuinely smile and him nod to himself in some sort of satisfied way. Andy would sometimes text back, though Nile never saw Nicky do the same. There were quick, quiet, somewhat stilted calls to Joe in the middle of the night to rehash whatever game had been on TV earlier. And photos to Nile. Never any words, just photos. Of the river where they’d walked that night Paris, paintings in a museum, dogs in a park, a glass of water. One day he sent her a picture of a different glass of water every eight hours.

And then, two days ago, he’d sent a group text, a lead on a job in Switzerland. Their phones had all chimed at the same time, they’d read the message at the breakfast table together, and all looked at each other. Well, they’d all looked at Andy. She’d taken a minute- literally, Nile had counted the full sixty seconds- and then nodded. “We’ll move out at first light tomorrow.”

And now they’re here, and Booker is here, and it’s… okay. Okay, and weird. Nobody’s play-acting, pretending none of the bad stuff of the past happened. There's distance, wariness maybe, but there’s a noticeable lack of animosity in the air too. Kidnapping and torture and the reappearance of a long-lost sister will do that, probably. Some. Maybe.

Or maybe Nile is the weird one. Because the others seem content enough, having poured over Booker’s info together and made their plans to hit the Panzer Museum the next day. They’d had dinner together- a little quieter than usual, a little awkward- and are now settling in for the night. They’re peaceful, at least. 

Maybe it’s an immortal thing? Or a… immortal-for-longer-than-Nile thing? Because she feels like she might jump out of her skin at any moment if something doesn’t fucking happen.

They’ve spent the last six years as Andy and Joe-and-Nicky and Nile, and they’ve got a good thing together. She knows them, trusts them, loves them. And they’re building a dynamic that works. Her psyche might still be a bit of a mess, and she doesn’t know how to feel about the very long future ahead of her, but them? It’s honestly so good, she’s not ready for anything to change it.

And how messed up is that? How selfish? When she was the one who had tried to convince everyone that Booker- 

“Nile?”

She looks up from where she’d been zipping and unzipping the bottom of her hoodie with reckless abandon. Booker- who’s barely said a word to her since they got here, who probably can’t look her in the eye either, which she’d be able to verify better if _she_ could look _him_ in the eye- is standing in front of her, holding her heavy winter coat. Holding his own, too.

“Take a walk with me,” he suggests. Doesn’t ask, doesn’t order. It lies somewhere in between. 

Nile glances around the room before answering. Nicky is sitting in front of the electric fireplace, one hand fixing the settings, his other resting gentle and solid on Joe’s wrist. Joe, bundled in an oversized sweater, has his arms wrapped so tight around Nicky that he’s managed to get both hands stuffed into the front pocket of Nicky’s sweatshirt. They’re sitting as close to the heat as they can get. Nicky’s got his faint ‘zoned out’ smile on, she can’t even see Joe’s face because it’s pressed into Nicky’s shoulder blade, and she knows they’re not moving any time soon. 

Andy is just coming in from the kitchen, sets a mug of something within Nicky’s reach, then takes a seat on the couch with her own drink. She nods very slightly at Nile, _Go ahead if you want_.

And Nile finds she actually does. “Okay.”

They walk out onto the street and Nile lets him take the lead, not really caring where they’re going. They end up stopping at the old wooden bridge that passes over the river, leaning on the rail, watching the tourists and the snow and the stars.

“Is this the first snow of the season?” he asks. Something in his tone almost sounds hopeful, like he wants to make sure he hasn’t missed it.

Nile nods, turns away from him again. She watches the tourists and locals mixed together, the voices and lights from restaurants bouncing off the water. A string quartet- maybe a live one?- playing a few streets away. “For us, yeah. We haven’t done it in awhile- Nicky and Joe aren’t super happy with cold temperatures right now, after what happened in Cape Town. We haven’t been this far north in the last two years.” She takes a couple slow deep breaths to savor the smell and taste of the air, the snow flurries sprinkling her coat. 

“What happened in Cape Town two years ago?” Booker asks, part genuinely curious, part teasing in an echo of her endless questions when they first met.

Nile shakes her head. “One of them chained up for twenty-six hours in a frozen meat locker.” 

He winces. “Okay then.”

“They-” she wonders if this is a good idea, after everything, but what the hell- “They’ve missed you, I think.” He winces again, for an entirely different reason. “Little things, like something stupid happens I can tell they’re expecting you to be there and say something, and you’re not, and they get sad. I didn’t notice it at first, but-”

“Once you know how to read those two… they’re open books,” he smiles, and it’s not the biggest smile she’s ever seen on him, but it still kind of rocks her. Because it’s real.

“Yeah,” she offers a tentative smile back. “I’m starting to get that.”

“How long did it take for you to figure out about a third of their stories are complete bullshit?” 

Nile rolls her eyes. “I’m more shocked it’s only a third of them. Can’t believe they actually partied with David Bowie in the seventies.”

“It took you a lot less time to figure them out than it took me.” He gives her a little mock-salute. “I have pictures from those parties somewhere, by the way.”

Something about the salute seems weird, and then she realizes what- it’s not a toast. “No flask,” she blurts out. _Super smooth, Freeman_. His smile drops, but not in a sad way. More bracing for wherever this conversation is about to go. “You’re not drinking,” she tries again. 

...Better?

“Not as much,” he allows. “After your, uh, visit, and after Quynh, it just... didn’t taste the same.” 

“Good,” she says shortly, and hopes she walks that fine line between sincerity and maybe a little bit of spite. His smirk tells her she hasn’t succeeded, but she has no idea which way it landed.

“I thought if I waited it out long enough, the justification would come. The right excuse for why I did what I did would just,” he snaps his fingers, “appear. The longer it seemed to take, the angrier I got.” He huffs a heavy breath of air, shakes his head. “I thought two hundred years was a long time to be alive, but six months with just those feelings… that was an eternity. That was real grief.”

Nile purses her lips, frowns. “If we had-”

“No, no, no. You did. You tried, Nile, remember? You all did, if I’m being honest. I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t- I needed those six months, and these years since, to get my head on straight. To realize what I’d actually had. That mess with Quynh sped everything up, but…” He smiles again, and it’s still real. Nile still isn’t used to it. “Andy was right. I was doing a shit job, and it wasn’t something I could blame on other people.”

“Even though you tried,” she adds before she can stop herself.

“Oh, I definitely tried,” he nudges her shoulder. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am now that I failed.”

She nudges him right back, and the knot in her stomach, her chest, her throat, loosens a little at a time. He’s okay. Or gonna be. “Me too.”

He clears his throat, stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Andy and I have talked, and will continue to. We’re good. And Nicky and Joe, I know how to make amends, even if it takes time. They’re… easy to read.”

“AKA, they’re saps,” she interprets.

He nods ruefully. “You were right, back in Paris. I hurt them, and I hurt myself. And they were upset about both of those things.” He looks far away for a moment, then comes back to her, points at her. “But you, Nile, I was very unsure about.”

“About what?”

“How to make amends.”

She frowns. “Oh, you- you don’t have to-”

“Not in the same way, maybe. Not for Merrick and Copley. But for what I said to you in Paris, and not being around these last few years, to… well, not that it seems like you’ve really needed me.”

“It’s not about need,” Nile shrugs a little, lowers her voice just in time when she remembers they’re surrounded by civilians. “I just- I really want someone else around who’s still figuring this shit out. I still don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I still freak out when I have to kill someone. I still freak out when one of us dies. There was a three month stretch where I tried to die as much as possible to force myself to get used it. It sucked. I don’t-”

“Here’s a secret,” Booker lowers his voice too. “We’re all constantly figuring this out. If this hadn’t happened to you and you were still a Marine or back home, you’d still constantly be figuring your shit out. That’s just a part of life, no matter how long it is. Lucky for you, you don’t have to rush it.”

She blinks away the sudden, hugely-unwanted threat of tears. “But I’m still-”

“You’re empathetic. You’re caring. You value life. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that death- anyone’s death- bothers you. I’d say it’s a very good thing. Hold onto that, Nile, even if it hurts. Because the opposite? Way worse.”

And damn it, she had just beaten back the tears and here they were trying to come back again. “See? That right there? That’s some good fucking amends.”

He smiles, pulls one hand free of his pockets. “And it wasn’t even what I had planned.” He holds out his hand to her and drops something into her palm when she mirrors the movement.

It’s a locket. Old, of course, but she can tell it’s been recently polished. She runs her finger along the rose etched on the front, then looks up at him, waiting for- for whatever he wants to say.

“It belonged to my oldest.” Her breath hitches a little when his does. _Oh, we’re getting into this?_ “Each of them got one at their christening.” He breathes deep, clears his throat. “He eventually gave his to his wife, but when they passed, their belongings were sent to me. I had no idea until then that he’d kept it so long. He never told me.”

“I can’t accept this, it’s-”

“It would weigh me down if I carried it, Nile. And I’d let it. I _have_ let it. I think it would be best for,” he eyes her cautiously, “for someone else in the family to have it for awhile.”

She feels her fingers curl around it of their own accord, and she pulls it closer, holds it against her chest. “I- okay. Thank you.”

“And anyway, I want you to have it. As your sign,” off her questioning look. “That when the time is right, I’ll come back. Because I want to.”

“You could just come with us now,” she offers, kinda half-heartedly. She’s not even sure if it’s her place to make that offer, or if it’s even the right time yet, and luckily he solves the problem by shaking his head.

“I still have some unfinished business to attend to. Some work to do here,” he taps his head. “And I have to feed my fish.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “I- I can’t decide which is worse- that that’s true or a really weird euphemism for something.”

He chuckles, deep and throaty and real- holy shit, that’s what Booker’s real laugh sounds like, and she files that away for later. For some reason, she thinks Andy will want to know she heard it.

He gestures with his head back towards the safe flat, and she nods. They start the walk back, shoulder-to-shoulder this time, and maybe she’s not quite sure enough yet to thread her hand through his elbow or throw an arm around his waist like she would Nicky or Joe, but everything between them and around them and through her just feels better. She likes it. It’s a good start.

“I used to take my sons on a walk for Christmas Eve, before mass and Le Réveillon,” he mentions, and she revels in the fact that while the grief is still there in his voice, it’s not with that drowning pain anymore. “I’d forgotten about that until this morning, realized the date. When they were young, they always had fights over who got to hold whose hand as we walked.”

“My brother and I used to stay up way too late, and peak through the crack in our door to watch Mom set up Santa’s presents under the tree. We let it go on for years with her thinking we still believed in him. It was kinda fun, in a weird way. Like we were helping her believe in something too,” she smiles, and realizes with a start that she doesn’t have that pain anymore either.

They round the corner back to their street, and there are Andy, Joe, and Nicky standing on the sidewalk, enjoying the first snow of the season. (She tries and oh so definitely fails to hide the smile at the scarf Nicky had knitted last year wrapped about six times around Joe’s neck and face.) Nicky’s the first one who spots them, and he smiles slightly, and only hesitates for a few seconds before beckoning them both forward. 

Nile looks at Booker, grins, and then threads her arm through his, pulling him a little quicker in their direction. “Thank you for the necklace.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You know what would make it, like, a _really_ good present though?”

He laughs again (and they’re close enough now that Andy opens her eyes at the sound, maybe smiles a little too). “The photos of Joe and Nicky making out with David Bowie?”

And then Joe’s eyes fly open too. “Wait, what, no-”

Nile pretty much shrieks with joy. “Making out with-?!”

“There are photos-?” Andy doesn’t exactly look sad either.

“We didn’t make out _with_ him, he was just kind of… encouraging. How are there photos-”

Nicky doesn’t even attempt English, just sighing and mumbling in that particular dialect of Italian he uses when Nile describes him as ‘long-suffering.’ She’s picked up enough of it that she can hear the word “lion” and decides maybe she doesn’t want to translate any more of it. Instead she pulls Booker those last few feet to the rest of the group, and, for the first time in a long while, feels like she can see a real future, an attainable one.

And it's not dark, it's not scary, it's not lonely. It's the four-maybe-five of them. These ridiculous, amazing people currently arguing about rock 'n' roll lyrics, catching snowflakes on their tongues, proposing what exactly Nicky should cook for them for breakfast the next morning. And it's her- happily, easily, warmly- in the middle of it all.


	3. But It's All Right, It's For A Worthy Cause

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nile and Nicky. N&Ns. Just like the candy! Warnings for: violence and torture in the first story, as well as the utterly painful situation of Nicky and Nile saying not nice things to each other. (Forgive them, they're both having a bad day.) Mentions of temporary immortal character death and a permanent minor character death in the second story. 
> 
> (Chapter title is from the Prince song “Starfish and Coffee.”)

_1\. Cape Town, June 3, 2024_ _  
  
_

It’s not until Year Four that Nile gets to experience a building falling down around her.

_We have. To stop. Splitting. Up._

She makes it out of what had been her vantage point for the job- y’know, before it collapsed- with her clothes and boots singed, coughing probably more than a healthy amount of smoke out of her lungs, but alive. She can’t see the shadow of Nicky’s sniper nest across the street anymore, and she can’t hear Andy or Joe in her brand new Copley-supplied ear bud. Shit.

“Guys? Somebody sound off here, please?” she rasps, having the forethought to keep to the alley next to the rubble that had been her designated position. Her gun is out and ready. Her imagination is absolutely not conjuring thirty-eight different worst case scenarios. “Motherfu-”

“Nile,” Nicky’s voice is quiet, tense in her ear. “Get to Evac One.” 

That’s the car, parked in another alley three blocks up and one over. “On my way. There in five.” Still nothing from Andy or Joe. Double shit.

She moves as fast as she can on wobbly knees without full-on running, keeping to the shadows as the blast starts to gain civilian attention. Which means camera phones, live streams on social media, and regular media in the next twenty minutes or so. They need to be _gone_ -gone before then.

But all four of them need to be at the car in order to be gone-gone.

It’s just Nicky when she gets there, leaning back way too casually against the trunk, his hands bunched in the pockets of his hoodie, no doubt holding at least one gun, if not two, there. She does one brief visual sweep of the alley before joining him. “What happened?”

“Are you alright?” he asks first, giving her the same study she’d been giving the alley.

She waves him off. “Smoke inhalation. What. Happened?”

Nicky clenches his jaw tightly. “They were taken.”

“What?”

“They knew we were coming tonight. We’ll have to talk to Copley about that.”

“Nicky,” she grabs him by the arms, resisting the urge to shake him, manages to get a hand on one sleeve before he pulls away. “What happened to Andy and Joe?”

He pushes himself off the trunk, digging for the car keys hidden behind the tailpipe. “I couldn’t see everything with the scope. But men were waiting for them, grabbed both and incapacitated… they were both unconscious.”

“Alive?” she doesn’t care if her voice sounds strangled. If Andy-

“Alive,” he confirms. “But down. Being…” he struggles for the right word, and in Nile’s opinion finds a pretty horrible one, “prepared. For transport. I couldn’t track where they were being taken when your building blew.” He waves off her ridiculous need to apologize for that. “One of the men who’d laid the charges was still there when I got to the street. We’ll question him back at the secondary location.”

“Yeah, we’ll ques-” Nile stops. Stares. “We’ll _what_?”

Nicky opens the car door, climbing in, his face still stoic and focused. “We need to hurry, they’ve gotten too much of a head start already.”

“We’ll _what_?!”

“He’s in the trunk, Nile. Get in the car now or I will leave you here.”

She almost stumbles. He’s never spoken to her like that, or to anyone, in the time she’s known him. He sounds like... he sounds like Andy. Nile’s feet are moving without her realizing, and she’s in the passenger seat and shutting the door just as Nicky throws the car sharply into gear.

It only takes a few minutes to get to the secondary location, the one set up for if their safehouse is compromised. And thank God for that, because the tension in the car has been rising with every passing second. She watches Nicky out of the corner of her eye as he seems to draw an invisible shield around himself. Or armor. Readying himself for something.

She’s terrified of what that something might be.

She tries to tell herself not to be; this is Nicky. This is sweet, patient, reliable and decent, former priest (ish) Nicky. Nicky who sits and breathes with her when she’s having panic attacks. Who buys washi tape and glitter gel pens instead of charcoal for Joe just to make him laugh. Who manages to patch up all of Andy’s wounds without her even getting disgruntled about the fuss. It’s _Nicky_. She’s just freaked out by this whole situation, that’s all it is.

That’s all it is, she tells herself again as she helps Nicky drag an unconscious man into the one room shack-cabin-thing. As she watches Nicky tie the man to a chair, take another chair and calmly sit facing the man as he slowly comes to.

That’s all it is.

Until it isn’t.

The man suddenly inhales sharply, pulls ineffectually at the ropes, and then registers Nicky in front of him. Nile can actually see the situation sink in, the fear sink in even further. And then, because he’s a stupid henchman (emphasis on ‘man’- _why are stupid men all the same kind of stupid?_ ), he settles on hiding behind bravado. He even seems to think it would be wise to smirk at a really pissed off immortal warrior. “You won’t get anything out of-”

His head is rocking back before Nile has even tracked Nicky throwing a punch. “Where are they?” He stands directly over the chair, arms crossed, not a single thing out of place or tic showing. It’s scarier than if he’d been unhinged.

“Who?” the man spits at him.

Another hit, then another, a boxer’s combination, and the crack of a broken nose. “Where are they?”

“Don’t know who you’re-”

The chair gets knocked over by this combo, and Nicky leaves it there, crouching down next to the man’s head as he coughs harshly. “Where?”

The man spits again, blood staining his teeth this time. “Nowhere.”

And then immediately starts choking, as Nicky’s hand surges out and clasps around his throat. “Listen to me very carefully. I am usually a patient man, but we’re on a bit of a deadline. So I might get sloppy with my methods if I have to keep asking you. I will not enjoy it, but I promise you, you will enjoy it much less. Understand?” Then he reaches with his other hand around the man’s back and calmly breaks one of his fingers.

The man’s yell is cut off by the hand still strangling him. “I’m not-”

“You know where they are being taken. You were headed somewhere when I found you. Please do not add insulting my intelligence to the list of your crimes committed tonight.” Another finger is snapped. Nile jumps at the sound. It seems louder this time. 

“I’m loyal,” the man protests stupidly, maybe losing higher brain functions along with half a pint of blood from his lip and nose.

“And were they men of honor, I’d offer my respect,” Nicky counters. Another finger breaks. “But they are vermin. They’re dust and don’t know it yet. They will be dead within twenty-four hours. So maybe now’s a good time to rethink your allegiances.” That’s four fingers broken. Nicky has skipped the pinky and gone for the thumb this time too, judging by the renewed yells of his captive.

_His_ captive. Because Nile is just an observer, and she doesn’t know if she has it in her to speak or... fuck... join in? If Nicky asks her-? 

“Your friends will be dead too, then,” the man gasps out. 

“You seem to know enough about us to know that’s not true,” Nicky rights the chair in one harsh, violent motion, causing the man to groan at the change in his equilibrium. “So do not try to threaten me with that.”

“Doesn’t matter. The boss said he knows how to deal with you lot.”

It sends a spike of ice, a frisson of fear through Nile's spine; the team hasn’t come close to being discovered or seriously threatened since Merrick. This- this is not good. And who knows if these people know the truth about Andy. Or, well, the second truth. The reverse truth.

Nicky seems to agree, because he’s now holding a knife to the man’s throat. “Then I think I should meet your boss. Tell me where he is, and we can speed up that twenty-four hours.” 

“I can’t-”

“I disagree.” Nicky stares the man down, and when he doesn’t say anything, calmly drives the knife into his shoulder.

The man yells, bucking in the chair, but Nicky is impassive, holding it in place, brick and mortar and stone. “I can’t-”

Nicky twists the knife handle.

Nile flinches hard at the scream it produces, finds herself looking away. Tries to do what she thinks Andy would do, hold steady and firm, remember the mission at hand, remember her need to protect her family. But really, she finds herself hoping that Joe and Andy will just burst in at any moment, having rescued themselves. 

And really-really, Andy would probably be shoulder to shoulder with Nicky.

And Nile isn’t. Can’t.

Nicky has pulled the knife free, another harsh and jerking motion, trailing the blade across to another spot to stab back in, and she isn’t… can’t… “Wait?” she can’t stop herself, soft enough that it’s barely heard over the man’s groaning.

Nicky looks over at her, and she can’t tell if it’s worse that she knows it’s still him, that his eyes are still his own. This is him in control. “If you need a break, you can keep watch outside.” It's like he's unconcerned with her questioning him. It's like she’s being dismissed.

Nile stumbles back, has to try twice before she can get the door open and shut behind her, gulping gratefully for the fresh air. She isn’t sure how long she’s out there alone, which is a double strike and something Andy would totally kick her ass for - first for not paying attention on watch, second for not keeping track of the time. How long have Andy and Joe been missing now? How long has Nicky been…?

The door slams open and shut either ten or seventy-five thousand minutes later. Probably somewhere in between. Nicky has his sword strapped to his waist, two guns holstered, and another loose holster he holds out to her. “Let’s go.”

“What…” She isn’t sure how to finish the question, what she actually wants to ask. What happened? What did the man say? What do I do if I can’t ever stomach this?

“There was a crime syndicate a few years ago. Eastern Europe. We ruined a few of their enterprises, and they put a hit out on Andy,” Nicky is oblivious to or already moving past her inner turmoil. He shakes the second holster at her until she takes it, then heads for the car. Expecting her to follow. “The whole thing tonight was a set up just to get her. This is a mid-level organization here, the boss wants to impress.”

“Shit,” she just about manages to get her door shut and seat belt on when Nicky throws the car into first gear and peels out. “But they- will they kill her?”

“Not anytime soon.” He grips the steering wheel tightly. “They know about us. Or, at least, enough of them believe their stories of unkillable soldiers. They think she’s still immortal. She’s supposed to be shipped back to Tallinn tomorrow morning on a cargo plane for another transfer.”

“So they could still accidentally kill her. If they think she can handle more than she- wait, what about Joe?”

Nicky only clenches his jaw, giving nothing else away. “They’re going to keep him.”

She isn’t sure if it’s the super-tight turn he takes around a corner, heading for the back road out of town, or if it’s that particular sentence ( _what does ‘keep’ mean?_ ), but she feels a little like she’s going to throw up. “Did you kill that guy?”

“Yes,” Nicky says it simply. “We’ll have to come back when this is over and dispose of the body properly. Or see if Copley can do it for us somehow. For now, focus on this, understand?”

But see, she doesn’t. She doesn’t really understand a lot of this. “I’m just… are you okay? With- with what you did?” Maybe that’s why he’s been so out of reach tonight. Maybe he needs her to-

“What is it you think I did, Nile?” this isn't the tone she wants to hear- Nile’s heard a version of it before, his ‘sniper voice,’ she privately calls it. When he’s focused, mission-ready, lets everything else drop away. 

But the everything else right now is… “You tortured a guy. And murdered him.”

“I interrogated and eliminated a threat,” he counters. “Because two members of our team are in danger, and it’s a very real danger now.” Because Andy will die. 

“I get that,” she hedges. “That part, yeah. But- I don’t know. You were a priest. I never thought of you as someone who-” she almost said ‘the ends justify the means,’ but what little she does know about that quote, probably not the best to use now. “Who’d be okay with something like that.” 

“Torture and murder?” he throws her words back out into the air.

“No, no, it’s not... I just…” he’s giving her nothing, and she’s _trying_. She’s trying to bridge this chasm right now, because it’s important. For the mission at hand, and for them. For forever from now on. She remembers those first few days, talking to Andy after she killed all those men in the church. How sick it made Nile feel, how heavy it made Andy feel, and how Andy admitting the regret had been the first time she'd felt a connection to her. “I- I thought we were both…” she’s holding her cross necklace without realizing it. But also not without meaning to, maybe.

And Nicky, eyes never leaving the road, sees that. “We were both of Christian faith, so we wouldn’t believe in such things?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” she hates herself a little for having so much emotion in her voice, when he has none. Her face feels hot, skin too thin. She hasn’t felt like this much of a rookie in years, and it’s painful. She’s supposed to be an immortal fucking warrior, how is she going to get past this sick feeling? And the one guy who she thought had that same… who the fuck knows- moral center?- as her, he’s talking to her now like a misguided child. 

Maybe she never will get past it. Right now, she can’t figure out if she’s feeling more guilty or angry about that.

Feeling guilty about feeling guilty. That’s gotta be pretty Catholic, right?

But Nicky must hear something else she’s not actually saying. “Do you think that’s the worst you’ll see? Or the worst I’ve done?”

“I guess I never thought about it before,” she says through gritted teeth, not really in the mood for this student-teacher conference. Sliding more into angry now. “I’ve never had to.”

“You have to now. And whatever your own feelings, I’m going to ask you to never again try to use my own faith against me like that.”

She freezes, but the obstinate (Andy-like) part of her starts to burn at the same time. A freezer burn of feelings. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Would you have been surprised if Andy had done that? Or Booker- he’s Catholic, what do you think he would have done? Would it be okay if he’d done this? Is it just me that gets this judgment?”

“I’m not saying you-”

“You can’t believe faith and goodness are the same thing. I’ve seen pious people do some of the worst things humanity can imagine. Sometimes in the name of God, sometimes just because. Yus-” he clears his throat, and plows ahead even more emotionless. Or maybe just more ruthless. Twisting a knife handle again. “Joe’s first home was razed by Christians. Two of his sisters, his niece and nephew, his cousins-”

“I wasn’t trying to-”

“-his childhood best friend, his favorite teacher, his first lover- all slaughtered by men of God. Some right in front of him. Some in front of me as well.” 

“Nicky...” _He's scared too,_ she reminds herself. _And he's being forced to lead this army of two._ He can't be okay right now either-

“Do not equate someone’s religion with their morality. And, most especially, do not do that with me.”

Or, y'know, fuck that. “Yeah, well, I’m not exactly equating age with wisdom here either,” she finally snaps. “You think I haven’t been treated shittily by white people thinking they’re doing the Lord’s work? Don’t do that to me, Nicky, like I’m so naïve.”

“I’m not saying this to insult you, Nile. I’m saying it to teach you.”

Whether he means it or not, it _feels_ condescending, and she doesn’t exactly have a history of reacting well to that. “Teach me what, that whenever Joe’s in danger I’m going to have to worry about you going off the rails?”

His hands grip the steering wheel so tight she honestly thinks they may leave permanent indents. “Apparently there are many things to teach you. For one, I haven’t ‘gone off the rails’ in almost six hundred years. For another, that you would dare think me so immature as to compromise his or Andy’s safety. Or ours. _That_ is naïve.”

“It’s not about maturity, Jesus Christ, will you actually just listen to me for a second?” 

“Nile.” His teeth almost make noise, they’re grinding together so hard. “Right now, I can’t give you whatever it is you’re- we have to get this done.”

“You don’t feel anything about that at all? There’s no part of you that feels... bad?” she tries anyway. _It’s okay if you do. Please tell me it’s okay that_ I _do._

He slams the car into park just behind a small storage unit. There’s a warehouse complex just around the corner. High fences, strategically placed lights, a runway at the far end. “We’re here.” He’s out and rummaging through the trunk before Nile’s gotten her seatbelt off. “Boss’s office is the south east building. We’ll start there.”

“Nicky…” she holds one of her guns, her favorite gun, the one he helped her pick out, loose in her hand. “Please, I-”

He straightens back up, his rifle strapped to his back, steel at his side, steel in his spine and his eyes too. “It’s irrelevant. What I feel about it. What I don’t like is you trying to _make_ me feel bad.” He shakes his head when she tries to speak again (and goddamn, they’re going to have a chat at some point about him continually cutting her off). “They’re selling Andy to a crime syndicate, and they’re not going to treat her gently in transport. She’s as good as dead if they manage to get her on that plane. And Joe can’t be in a cage again. What I did? Gives us a chance to save them. I will never regret that.”

“Would you have made me help you?” she asks, the words spilling out before she even realizes she’s spoken. 

Nicky looks at her for a solid second, then turns back to scanning the complex. “No. But there will be a time, maybe ten years from now, maybe three hundred, when you’ll be willing to.”

“I can’t think that’s true,” Nile whispers, gripping her gun tighter, following him to the perimeter fence, passing over her bolt cutters before he can ask for them. “I can’t.”

Nicky’s laugh is dry, bitter. Acrid, like the smoke she'd inhaled hours ago. “We’ve all, including you, killed people. It’s usually quick. Sometimes it’s not. You don’t have to do something like this, truly, if you don’t want to. But you don’t get to judge me for it.”

“Then why does it feel like you’re judging me?” 

He doesn’t answer. He breaks through the fence, hands back the bolt cutters, frees one of his guns. He nods towards the southwest building, and starts towards it.

She follows. She grips her gun tight, sights it, keeps Andy and Joe in her thoughts and in whatever's driving her to put one foot in front of the other. Maybe that's all it takes sometimes, keeping people in your thoughts even while there's a gun in your hands. Even while your question hangs in the air.

And he doesn’t answer.

***

_2\. Mexico City, March 29, 2023_

  
She clocks his presence the second she shuts the door behind her, and thinks that it really isn’t fair. She’d snuck out of the house so well. So carefully, so quietly, her sixteen-year-old-sneaking-out-to-that-Mary-J.-Blige-at-the-Chicago-Theatre-concert-self would have been proud.

But she hadn’t been living with immortal warriors when she was sixteen, huh?

Luckily Nicky isn’t totally up on his TV tropes, so he isn’t sitting in a chair waiting for her to come in so he can turn on a lamp and surprise her. He’s standing in the kitchen doorway instead, mug of tea in his hand.

But he’s definitely been waiting up for her. Why, when Joe is probably in their bed upstairs, she has no idea. Unless he wanted to…

“Are you going to yell at me?” she really isn’t expecting such a wobble to her voice. It sucks.

He shakes his head, and his eyes are so unfairly kind that she has to turn away from him, scanning the living room instead. Her own eyes are blurry, have been since they got out of the warehouse. Nothing in the house has changed- Andy’s dirty dishes on the table where she’d been eating dinner, Nicky’s sweater folded on the couch where he’d taken it off as he watched the news, Joe’s sketchbook on the rug where he’d been sitting on the floor against Nicky’s legs. Just like it all had been hours ago before the mission, and then an hour ago when she’d snuck out to go run eight or twelve or three hundred miles.

“How’s Joe?”

“Sleeping,” Nicky’s voice is as calm and kind as the rest of him. 

“And you’re sure he’s-?”

“He gets quiet after gut shots, always has for some reason, but he sleeps them off just as well. He’ll be perfectly fine in the morning,” Nicky takes another sip from his mug, eyes on her, not even pretending to look at the room like she is.

“Yeah? Good. That’s- that’s good.” Her hands flex tightly in her pockets. Good.

“How are you?”

She snorts a laugh. “I didn’t even get hit by anything. I wasn’t the one who-” she bites back the rest of it, jerks her head to the side as though the words are being yanked out of her in that direction.

“I would imagine you’re hurt from something else,” Nicky stays calm and measured. Unwavering.

“I’m fine.” 

“Nile.”

“I don’t know _what_ I am right now, Nicky,” she smacks her palm flat on the top of the chair next to her and takes a small bit of satisfaction in the dull, thumping sound it makes. “I’m- I’m angry, and I’m upset, and I’m both of those things at myself and at Joe and I don’t know why-”

“He died for you,” Nicky cuts in simply, moving closer to her.

Cuts in, and cuts her. “He…”

“You’ve never had him die for you before.”

Nile shakes her head. “I’ve seen him die like a hundred times, that can’t-”

“You’ve seen him die,” Nicky is gentle, reaching out to uncurl her fingers from the wooden frame of the chair. “But you’ve never seen him die _for_ you. It’s a different feeling,” he offers a sad smile. “Believe me, I know.”

Nile can feel herself deflating, inch by inch. “I’m- it’s not that I’m pissed at him for actually doing it. Or ungrateful.”

“I know,” Nicky repeats, a slightly more genuine smile to him now.

Nile turns, drops into the poor abused chair, and then further drops her head into her hands. “I don’t understand why. He shouldn’t have.”

Nicky laughs very quietly, very quickly. But it’s not angry, thank God. It’s one of his Joe laughs. “It’s difficult to stop him once he starts.”

“No, I mean he-” she swallows hard. “We’ve run how many maneuvers at this point? He’s never there. He’s supposed to be six paces to the left.” It’s their new formation, one they worked on for months and months, adjusting for Booker’s absence and Andy’s mortality. When they move forward in a horizontal wave- Joe on the far left, then Nile, then Andy, then Nicky on the far right. They’ve done it so many times she can do it in her sleep. Her muscles know exactly where to go. And where everyone else should go. “He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Joe wasn’t supposed to get in front of her.

“Nile,” Nicky’s voice is suddenly sparking, almost visible in the dark room, like striking a flint. His eyes catch hers when she has no choice but to look up, not when he says her name like that. “No matter how much you may want, you can’t force death on yourself.”

It’s a punch to her chest, paralyzing her lungs. “I…”

“You can try, sure. We all have in some way or another, at some point or another. But it won’t work. You’ll just hurt worse than you were before.”

“I wasn’t…” her voice comes out a whisper, pushing through frozen lungs.

“You were,” Nicky insists, though he still doesn’t sound like he’s accusing her. Or admonishing her. “You have to remember, you’re on a team that has almost literally seen it all. We knew it was coming, but I wasn’t- wasn’t watching at that moment.”

“You knew it was coming?” _You didn’t try to stop me?_

“We all go through it. It can’t be forced. It can’t be headed off. It just has to take its course, and then we’re here to help you move on.”

“Even if I kill your husband while doing it?” she chokes on the words.

“You didn’t kill Joe. He died for you. There’s a difference.” He inches closer and lays a hand on the arm of the chair. Not her arm. Not yet. “Would you like to tell me why you wanted to die tonight?”

She shudders. Had she? She prepares for the possibility every time they go out, tells herself she’s getting so much better when it happens, it doesn’t freak her out every time she wakes up now. And yeah, maybe sometimes she doesn’t try too hard to get out of the way when someone aims a gun at her...

But tonight Joe must have seen something in her face or her stance. Between one blink and the next, he… They practice a lot, her and Joe and Nicky, throwing themselves in different directions at different angles, to practice covering Andy. Joe had done a textbook perfect twist and lunge. To cover Nile.

And she’s somehow mad he’d taken it away from her. “I wanted… Do you believe in Heaven, Nicky?”

“Yes,” he answers so simply, honestly. “Whether or not it’s that ideal, rewarding afterlife we’ve been taught, I might waiver, but I do think there’s… peace. When all this is over.”

“Me too.” And she’s already crying, and she can tell Nicky is concerned by that, but she keeps talking anyway. “Have you ever seen it, though? If it were- when you’ve died, have you ever… I don’t know, a flash of something, a vision, anything?” 

“If I have, I don’t remember,” his voice is river rock against her desperate tide, and she tries to calm down, match it. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but it’s not for me to say.”

“I just want to see my mom,” her voice cracks so hard she almost loses the last word completely.

And then his hand is on her arm, gripping tightly. “What?”

She focuses on the touch. “I don’t know. It hit me last month. Next week is-”

“A year since she passed,” he finishes for her, eyes widening. “Oh, Nile, I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s-” she waves a hand, ready to brush it away, but Nicky grabs it out of the air, holds tight. “It’s okay,” she tries weakly.

“It absolutely is not,” he insists, pulling her- gently, not insistently- into the kitchen. “Sit, sit, please.”

She drops onto one of the benches along their kitchen table, watches him as he starts rummaging in the cabinets. “I’m not really hungr-”

“This is a conversation that needs tea, Nile. There’s some of that elderberry nonsense in here-”

“It’s not nonsense, it tastes-”

“Like gummy bears.”

“Like liquid gold,” she starts to smile too, feeling it climb across her face. He makes a scandalized face even as he reheats the kettle.

She lets the smile, the lightened mood, carry through for as long as she can. Which is, like, three minutes. The whistle of the kettle brings her back, and even though it’s different- it’s _so_ different- the sound brings her back to earlier, to Andy’s shout and the gunshots, Joe falling in a heap in front of her. She turns her face to the side, hiding the flinch, as Nicky pours the water, adds her tea to the mug.

“How long does it take you to grieve?” 

He busies himself with finding some more of his own tea instead of answering right away. “I don’t actually want to tell you,” he admits. “I don’t want to give you something to compare yourself to.” He pours some for himself, then turns back to her. The sympathetic, painfully kind smile on his face almost undoes her. 

“Please?” Tears start to gather in the corner of her eyes. Nile tries to head them off by squeezing her eyes shut tight, but it just pushes them down her cheeks, dripping onto her lap. She lets them fall. She lets herself cry.

She feels Nicky come sit next to her, run a hand along her shoulders and back. “We’re always grieving something,” he murmurs. “Mortal, immortal, it doesn’t matter. All life loses something.”

“Or someone,” she sniffs.

“Or someone,” he agrees, voice even, neither apologizing nor admonishing. It just is. “But you know, I think that’s okay. Sometimes I even think it’s good.”

“To lose people?”

“To grieve,” he corrects gently. “To feel the loss. How else do you understand how special life is without it? How else can you know to love that person, or any person, while you have them?”

She blinks her blurry eyes open. “Better to have loved and lost, et cetera et cetera?”

Nicky gives her shoulder an extra squeeze, stands up again. “Tennyson got a few things right.” He goes about preparing their tea, taking out the steeped bags, adding honey to his. “The day is going to hurt for a long while, for years, and I’m sorry about. But like so much, all you can do is breathe through it. Eventually, the love lingers over the hurt.”

“Yeah,” is all she can say. She knows that, she remembers that from her dad. Maybe she’d hoped immortality would shield her from this type of wound too. 

_I would imagine you’re hurt from something else._

Shit.

“Your brother, how has he been?” Nicky ventures.

“Doing okay,” she sniffs again. “Graduated, already going back for his masters.” Child psychology, she’s pretty sure, based on the copies of essays and applications Copley had managed to send her way. A shining light, her pride and joy even now. “And Jay- I told you about her, right? From my unit? She moved to Chicago after her discharge. They meet up for pizza every couple of weeks.”

“See?” Nicky says, his smile so loud in such a quiet voice. “Love and grief go hand in hand.”

“Yeah.” She knows that. She knows it has to hurt. She knows it gets better.

It all takes time.

“We’ll go to Chicago,” Nicky announces suddenly. Decisively. “We’ll check with Copley tomorrow that tonight’s op wrapped everything up, then we’ll go.”

“We can’t just go,” she protests weakly. Already having mentally packed her bags at the word ‘Chicago.’

“We can,” he says, just as firm. “You need to be there for the day. We’ll figure out the details.” He’s had his back to her while preparing the tea, but now he turns, brings the mugs over the table and sits at the bench across from her. “We’ll figure it out.”

Aaaaaaand there she is crying again. Nicky gives her the space and the quiet this time, sips at his tea, grimacing good-naturedly when she drinks her elderberry tea.

“Do you remember your mother?” she asks after awhile, once her tears have dried again. 

“Do I remember her?” Nicky seems both surprised and prepared for the question, somehow. Like he thought it would come up, just not sure when.

She fiddles with her sleeve, looking down. “Andy’s said she doesn’t remember hers, which, yeah, I believe. Joe told me he doesn’t remember his either, but I’m pretty sure that’s a lie,” she looks up then, just a little, for confirmation.

Nicky is smiling, but it’s so soft and sad, and his hand flexes like he wishes he was holding someone else’s. “It is.”

There’s a story there, and Nile knows it’s not one for right now, for them. “Booker obviously remembers, like, everything. Too much. Do you remember yours?”

He takes a moment before answering. “Sometimes. I lost her when I was a young man, already at the seminary. Her face isn’t always clear to me, though I remember being told I looked like her. I remember how she smelled. I remember her favorite foods, but I don’t have any memory of her eating them. I remember the songs she would sing, but not always her voice. Strange things like that.”

Nile thinks of her phone in her pocket. Her photos, videos. Tomorrow, she decides. Tomorrow she’s going to back them up on multiple cloud accounts and an external drive. She has to. She’s got six different safety deposit boxes in banks around Europe, any one of them will be a good spot to store it. “Strange?” she asks. “Not… not bad, or good, but strange?”

“Strange in that it’s both, I guess.” He shakes his head, shrugs in such a way that she knows it’s a learned gesture. Something he taught himself. For a brief moment she wonders when he decided to learn. _My surrogate brothers are older than shrugs_ , is one of the more random thoughts she’s ever had in her entire fucking life, thank you very much. 

She frowns, scrunches up the side of her face. “There are worse answers. I guess.”

“How about this then- I do remember the most important thing about her. I remember exactly how she made me feel. I remember how much she loved us, my brothers, me. And best of all, I can still feel close to her whenever I want, when I get to show that same love to my family now. As long as I still have the ability to love, as long as I have all of you, I still have her.”

“So you’ll never really lose her,” she sips at her tea, contemplating it all.

“Not the most important part, no.” His eyes drift towards the stairs for just a fraction of a second, soften an even smaller fraction, just enough for her to know that they are about to have someone else join them. 

Sure enough, Joe shuffles in, eyes not even half-open and about as rumpled as Nile has ever seen him outside of that time they had to jump out of that airplane in Dubai. He mumbles something, voice so slurred she has no idea if it’s Persian or English or some completely invented language altogether. (She’ll never forgive him for the one time he threw Tolkien Elvish into one of their rounds of Guess The Language. She got him back though. A childhood worship of Lieutenant Uhura helped her sneak Klingon into the next round.)

He flops down across from her, eyes closing again as he leans bonelessly into Nicky’s side, head pillowed on his arms on the table. Nicky just rests his elbow on Joe’s spine, propping it there so his hand can brush through Joe’s hair easily, a slow and steady back and forth, sipping his tea with the other hand like this is nothing new. Joe slides one of his hands out across the table towards Nile, offering it to her.

Nile takes it with a grin on her face, doesn’t care that it’s probably embarrassingly sappy. She likes that they’re so affectionate with each other and her. She knows from Andy that there were times after they lost Quynh, and then after they gained Booker, that they’d held back in front of other people. And they had the first few weeks with her too, until they got to know her. But now, they’re safe and they’re comfortable- all of them are. And why shouldn’t sharing love when they’re just them together here be as important as sharing their strength when they fight out there?

And she doesn’t see the blood, the gut shot, the shell casings littering Joe’s torso now. She doesn’t see Joe diving in front of her, the guns... she doesn’t feel the urge to jump in front of those guns. She just sees sleepy, befuddled Yusuf and calm, content Nicky. She watches Joe clumsily try to grab for Nicky’s tea with his eyes still closed, and Nicky deftly pull it just out of reach each time, a playful smile on his face. 

She frees her hand from Joe’s and wraps his fingers around her own mug. Then has to help guide it back across the table to him so he doesn’t spill it all over his own face where he’s still resting it on the table and mumbling about gummy bears. Nicky smiles at him then at her, just a little bit of ‘I told you so’ to the smirk.

And it hits her right then. In the ways that Joe sometimes reminds her of Isaiah, and there have been times it’s been hard not to treat him like she would her little brother, Nicky reminds her of her cousin Micah, of Auntie Ava. All those family members who stepped in to help raise her after her dad died. Of Jay. Of Dizzy, too, before things went to shit. A brother in arms, even when- or maybe most importantly when- the ‘arms’ part is just the battle going on inside her. He’s going to take up whatever weapon he can and have her six. He’s going to fight for her, even in the times she can’t do it herself.

Semper Fi, right? Always faithful, always loyal.


	4. Don’t Cry Unless You’re Happy, Don’t Smile Unless You’re Blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter that started it all- Nile & Joe. Warnings for: discussions of mental health/depression in the first story, and a look at how a bouncy, warm, light-hearted character can’t really always be that way. Discussions of racism in the second story, including vague descriptions of past racial harassment and hate crimes - but nothing specific, because the victim is more important than the perpetrator, and I don’t want to put any reader in the position to read anything they may have heard/have to hear in their real lives. Love and recovery over reliving trauma and hate, baby. Always. 
> 
> (Chapter title is from the Prince song “Free.”)

_1\. Ahipara, October 26, 2027_

  
They’ve been going non-stop for two years, job to job to job to bloody (literally and British slang-y) job never-ending, and when Nile finds out that that’s pretty uncommon even for _them_ , she puts her foot down. It’s been an especially heavy couple of months since Booker officially, tentatively, rejoined them, and everyone needs a break. 

She picks out a cabin near the end of a peninsula, close enough to the ocean to hear the waves at night, and far enough from neighbors or civilization that the waves are the _only_ thing they hear at night. Mountains and water and trees, oh my. It’s beautiful and beautifully quiet. They’re all exhausted when they settle in, and it honestly takes a few nights of deep sleep and well balanced-by-Nicky meals on the regular before Nile feels remotely like herself again. Like she can almost breathe full breaths without wondering where the nearest weapon is, if anyone’s watching them, if there’s something she’s supposed to be doing.

Which is probably why she doesn’t notice anything wrong at first. Because it’s not like anything grows dark or ominous in the house. The space around them doesn’t change, routines don’t change. The wrongness must slither in, up through the floorboards or in through the air vents or something, because Nile never sees it coming.

The thing is, they’re in a slump. Not job-wise, they fucking rule there, but emotionally. Physically. It’s been a long couple of years, even by Andy’s standards- and that was immortal Andy. The mortal one needs to rest. A lot. Even if she won’t admit it. Luckily she’s not the only one right now who needs it- they’re all worn down. Wrung out.

The other thing is, whenever the group is in a slump, it’s an unspoken rule that Joe will be the one who’ll ultimately start bringing spirits back up when it’s time. He’s the one who can get someone talking if they need to, can find just the right activity to keep someone from wallowing, knows just what meal Nicky should cook to make himself (and all of them) feel better. 

They leave this task to Joe because he just seems to know when and how to do it. He always sneaks in with it at first, gives a few extra hugs or eye-crinkly smiles, knocking shoulders with whoever he’s sitting next to at any given time. And dear Lord, the puns. The worse the joke is, the better he wields it. He pushes if and when he has to, suggesting walks, long drives, sparring, one-on-one talks, whatever works. He easily puts up with the snapping, eye rolling, or weary teasing they throw back at him when they’re not at their best.

This time is just a little different, though. And she doesn’t realize it, not while it’s happening. Not until she looks back on this moment later and realizes Joe doesn’t initiate a single conversation with anyone once they get to the cabin. He talks, sure, and laughs, answers questions… but he’s not going out of his way to ask Nile about her sleep schedule, to tease Booker about getting a haircut, to flirt with Nicky over the firepit they find in the backyard. Andy shuts him down the first time he tries to check on her, and he just… stops. Curls in on himself a little. But hey, he’s worn out too, so Nile isn’t worried.

She has no _reason_ to be worried. Not on the mornings that he shuffles downstairs after everyone else has already eaten breakfast, because they all know he’s not a morning person and maybe he just wants to sleep in as much as he can right now. And not on the evenings when they sit down to dinner and he eats off of Nicky’s plate instead of getting one for himself, because it’s cute when they joust with the silverware. And not after, when he slips out to go for walks or sit by the ocean, because he always comes back in and goes to bed with Nicky every night.

And not that particular night they’re all sitting around the dinner table, not at first. Andy and Booker are reminiscing about some farm they stayed on for a job decades ago, and she starts teasing Booker about one of the horses that had definitely hated him.

“It got so bad,” Andy tells Nile through her laughter, straining to get words out, “I swear, she would wait until he was walking by to growl. Honestly. Fucking _growl_ at him.”

“It didn't growl,” he mumbles.

“ _She_ , Booker,” Nile corrected gleefully.

“Horses can’t growl.” 

“This one could,” Andy’s grin got wider. She was lighter today. Finally. Her eyes were about as clear as they’d been in years. “She growled at him. Every time. Every _time._ We loved that horse. By the time we finished the op, we had to name her…”

She pauses meaningfully, and Booker rolls his eyes but he pauses too. The silence goes on a beat too long, and Nile’s grin slips into a confused furrow. “What?”

Andy’s smile is like an afterthought suddenly, like she's forgotten it's there, and she and Booker are looking past Nile, across the table to Nicky and Joe. Nile glances over too, but doesn’t see anything amiss. Nicky’s adding honey to his tea, Joe is tilting his head to one side then the other, stretching his neck. Another second adds to the quiet, and Nicky’s hand twitches just a little. 

Super confused now, she turns back to Andy and Booker. “What?” she asks again.

Andy shakes her head, shakes off whatever weirdness just happened, and smiles again. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. I forgot the horse’s name. We,” another quick, super-quick, glance past Nile, then she shakes it off and it’s like nothing weird ever happened. “We run into so many animals that hate Book, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

“No. We’re not telling Nile about the platypus,” Booker- not quite as smooth as Andy, but then who is?- slips back into the previous mood too.

And it’s weird, yeah, but- “Yes, please?!”

It’s a couple hours later that she starts to get a reason. She’s sneaking back downstairs for some leftovers, and her stealth skills are getting so much better, she can totally do this without getting caught now… except the kitchen light is on and she can hear voices inside.

And normally she’d give up the stealth and just walk right in, but…

“Don’t give me that shit, you were sitting right there.”

But Andy sounds upset.

“He’s tired, Andy. We all are.”

“He missed the joke,” she insists. “He never misses it. I set it up, he names the horse. Joe doesn’t miss the bit, Nicky. Ever.”

“He’s allowed to be tired,” Nicky insists. “Let him be.”

“And you’re- you’re sure it’s not because of me?” Booker’s there too, voice low. 

“Because of you?”

“Me being back. It’s earlier than you all planned, than you wanted. If he isn't-”

“This isn’t about you, Book,” Andy is firm, sharp but not entirely unkind about it. “Give him more credit than that.”

“It’s not about anything,” Nicky dismisses them both. “We’re all tired. Don’t single him out.”

Another pause. “Nicky.”

“I’m not doing this,” this time it’s Nicky who’s sharp. Gently reprimanding. “I’m not having secret meetings, I’m not analyzing him behind his back. We’re not making this into something it’s not.” 

Nile sneaks back upstairs when she hears footsteps coming closer. She slips back into her bed, determined not to think too hard about this right now. Because Nicky’s right, they’re all tired. And even if… no. When it comes to the subject of Joe 101, she’s inclined to trust Nicky’s opinion over pretty much anyone’s.

And so, the next morning seems the same, feels the same, right up until Nicky comes down the stairs. It’s not that he’s running down them, or looking panicked or angry or anything, there’s just… an air. He’s unsettled. Off-kilter. Something. He walks right past them to the back windows, looks out, then turns and walks past them again to the front.

“Nicky?” Andy looks at him with a furrowed brow, uncertain if she should reach for a weapon, her phone, something.

But Nicky’s shoulders are already relaxing as he looks out the windows towards the beach. “It's nothing. It’s fine.”

Nile is sitting in the window seat, so she tries to see whatever Nicky’s looking at. But instead of relaxing, she frowns. He’s hard to spot unless you know to look for him, but she can just make out Joe’s figure sitting by the water, half-shrouded in the morning fog. “How long has he been out there?”

She hears Andy sigh behind her. “Nicky, go take Book on a supply run. I hereby give you free reign on grocery choices.”

Nile is close enough to see the twitch to Nicky’s jaw. But he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t look back at Joe or at either of them. He catches the keys Andy tosses at him and heads out through the back, Booker following dutifully after exchanging a quick nod with Andy. 

Nile waits until she hears the car drive off, then looks back at Joe sitting so still and so small on the beach. “Are you going to go talk to him?”

“Joe?” Andy comes to stand next to Nile’s window seat, peering out at him too. “No. And neither are you.”

“Wh-? Bu-?” Nile stares at her but points back at him, at Joe, their Joe, being so _not_ Joe. 

Andy shakes her head. “Nicky’s right, we have to leave him be.”

That’s what he’d said last night. Nile whips back around to stare at her. “You knew I was…?”

She smiles. “You’re getting a lot better, though. I don’t think Nicky or Book heard you at all.”

Nile sighs. So close, so close. “What was the thing about the horse?”

“We’ve told that story hundreds of times. He comes up with a new ridiculously stupid name for the horse every time. We’ve been going in reverse alphabetical order lately, it was up to N. Book and I had a bet going that he’d find some way to name the horse after Nicky.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No,” Andy taps at Nile’s feet, sits down in the space Nile makes for her. “He didn’t.”

“Is he okay?”

“It’s just a thing,” Andy shrugs, but she doesn’t seem nonchalant. She’s almost gentle, actually. “It’s just how he gets sometimes. He feels a lot, you know that.”

She does know that, of course she does. Everyone knows that. People who’ve known Joe for twenty minutes know that. “So?”

“So, whatever makes him _him_ , sometimes it gets to be too big and too much inside. He has to retreat for a bit. Every once in awhile, sometimes not for years, but it just… gets to be too much sometimes.”

He’s been sleeping late but having a hard time falling asleep, a list suddenly starts to form in her head, bullet points popping up one after another. Not eating as much- taking off of Nicky’s plate. Withdrawing- going on walks on his own in the evening. Stretching his neck and shoulders like he’s sore. Now that Nile thinks about it, really thinks about it, it’s been going on for over a week. Maybe two.

Nile realizes she has her hands clasped together, one on top of the other. Her thumb is rubbing against the back of her own hand, because there’s one missing between them. “How does leaving him to deal with it alone help?” 

“Because it’s what he wants. This isn’t a new thing, kid. We’ve got a process down. I give Nicky and Book a task and something else to focus on, and I’m telling you now so you know. I can give you something to do if you need it. Your axe throwing could use some-”

“No.” Nile takes a second to relax her grip on her own hands, flexes her fingers. “There are things he could do, or- or take...?” She can’t find the right words, or right way (like Joe would), to tell Andy this is something she doesn’t need to learn about. This is something she’s already an expert on. 

“Nile.” Andy shakes her head again. “I know- I’m sure there’s some shit with modern medicine we’re behind on, but the thing is, the healing we- _you_ have, it’s not-” she sighs, heavily, and takes her own look out at the beach. “There’s a kind of trade off. Whatever made us this way gets to decide how we heal. Medicine doesn’t always help. ”

“Then _we_ should be helping,” she argues.

“We are. He needs space.”

“Does he?” Nile stands up. “Or is that just what everyone does because it’s easiest?”

Andy catches her arm, holds her still for a moment. “He doesn’t like causing a fuss when he’s like this. He doesn’t want us to acknowledge it, I think it makes him feel worse. So just let him be for now. I promise you, when he’s feeling better you can take a page from Nicky’s book and smother him with affection.”

“Does he- does he know there’s a page and a book?” she feels her voice go quieter, frail maybe. Oops. “He knows?”

Andy pauses before answering, her eyes taking in Nile a little deeper, inquisitive, puzzled. Whatever she sees makes her sigh and drop her shoulders. “I won’t stop you, okay? Just be…” she stops, waves a hand. “I don’t think you should, but I won’t stop you.”

As though this is some lesson Nile needs to learn. But it’s for Joe, it’s to help him, so that can’t be true. Because this is something she can do, that maybe the rest of them can’t. 

With that to bolster her, she makes her way carefully across the front yard a few minutes later, taking the path down to the beach. Her eyes are half on the figure sitting by the water, and half… half remembering another figure shutting himself up alone in his bedroom while she stands helpless and scared in the kitchen. Her mom coming up next to her.

_Depression doesn’t just mean sad, kiddo. And it’s not just because something depressing has happened to you. It’s just… human. It’s something Izey’s going to live with from now on, and what we’re gonna do is make sure he knows we love him and we’re here for him, okay?_

Nile takes a more determined breath and moves forward. This is not the first time she’s done this. She can do it again. “I brought you some ojja,” she calls softly as she approaches.

Joe flinches.

He’s not startled, he’s not caught off guard. But he flinches, like she just hit him, like she’s hurting him just by... She almost flinches too, but clutches the bowl of leftovers tighter and continues. “You missed breakfast, thought you might want something.” She takes a careful seat next to him, goes to knock her shoulder gently against his, make a teasing remark about not overcooking the eggs this time… but she misses. He’s moved his shoulder, his whole body, just out of reach.

He’s never pulled away from her touch before. Ever. She’s never seen him pull away from _anyone’s_ touch before. He’s the one who makes contact, not… this. “That’s okay, Nile. But thank you.”

It’s a request more than an outright dismissal, maybe, but only just. And she can’t leave. She can’t. She sees the hunch of his shoulders, the white knuckle grip he has on his own upper arms. She sees Isaiah’s shoulders too, and the way he couldn’t look her or Mom in the eye some days. She stays where she is, puts the bowl down between them.

The look in his eyes is almost painful. “Please, Nile, don’t-”

“My brother got diagnosed with depression when he was fourteen,” she tries not to let the words burst out too quickly or loudly, really really doesn’t want him to flinch again. “It was hard for awhile. Everything was just…” she inadvertently echoes Andy’s words from earlier, “too much for him, sometimes. It took years before he got the right help and the right meds. I, uh, I got really good at being there for him. Helping.”

“That’s good. I’m glad,” and even with all this shit going on, she can tell he’s sincere about that. But he’s also very carefully neutral in his tone, oh-so-very controlled. It sounds like he’s talking through a filter, through a cloudy, smudged window. Unreachable, unreadable. He’s humoring her, and judging by the strain behind his eyes, it’s hurting him to do it. And coming from Joe, who she's heard more than one person (including _Booker_ ) describe as sunshine incarnate? It hurts her a little in return. 

“A couple years ago, when I was having a really shitty day, you and I decided to be there for each other if the others couldn’t understand what we were going through.” She turns a little to face him. Not full-on, not crowding him, but wanting to show him she means this. “I understand this too, Joe. I can help.”

He just as purposefully doesn’t turn to her. He keeps looking out at the ocean, biting at his lip. Giving her nothing.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that you make me feel so safe,” she says it lowly, lets the sound get soaked up by the waves and dragged back into the ocean. “Or I don’t say it enough, at least. Or why.”

Still nothing.

And that’s not Joe. He’s the most present person she’s ever met- in anger or despair or in relaxation or joy, Joe is never checked out. He’s tethered to the earth in a way that kinda grounds the others around him, Nile at least. And definitely Nicky, she’s seen that. The way they ground each other. This, this doesn’t make sense. For Nicky to allow Andy to send him off, for Joe to be so… not even closed off. Empty. He’s not even… he’s not _here_. And Nile is, so she’s going to bring him the fuck back.

“Everybody on the team has this armor, you know? Inside. All the shit you’ve seen and done, a thousand years of it, the shit that’s been done to you, of course they guard themselves on the inside. But not you. And it gives me so much hope that after everything, you’re still so open. It makes me feel safe to feel things too. I hope I… I mean, that’s the kind of person I want to be when I’m a couple hundred years old.”

Still. Nothing.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true. His hands are trembling a little, clutching at his sleeves a little tighter. If it weren’t for advanced healing, his lip would probably be swollen and bleeding from how hard he’s biting at it. 

And he won’t look at her. He won’t talk to her. He’s not… he’s not letting her hold his hand. One hand, sandwiched between hers, letting her sit next to him to talk or not talk, listen to some music, hum along to one of their dad’s old records that Mom still had sitting around… No. No. She’s not going to compare him to Isaiah, that’s not fair to anyone. She just wants to help. 

“Can I-” she stops, can’t start again, because she doesn’t know the right words here. Maybe Andy was right. (Joe isn’t even jumping in to help, and he always knows the words people are looking for. He’s the one who’s usually in her position. He’s the one who knows how to pick them up.) No. She can do this. “Tea, then? I could bring you some?”

Joe clears his throat, clears it again like that wasn’t enough, glances over at her, and his lips move just a little, just this shy of painful, and she can't even tell in what direction they go. “I’m- sure. Thanks.”

“Tea. Yeah. Good. I’ll be- yeah, good. I’ll be right back.” Nile tries very hard not to rush, not to scramble to her feet and scatter sand in every direction (or into the ojja). 

And she knows she shouldn’t, but she can’t help it- something like triumph goes through her as she hurries back to the cabin. This, _this_ is something she can do. Something nobody else on this team (family) can. Nile has spent the last seven years as the rookie, playing catch up on everything in this life, but now- this could be something that’s hers.

It may be a blip in the timeline for the rest of them, but to her? Seven years is a fucking long time to figure a life out, to carve out a role and a place in the world. And maybe, finally, Nile has done it. And if she can’t be this for Izey anymore, she can be for Joe. It’s something she can do that’s not fighting, that’s not killing or planning to kill or keeping others from being killed, it’s just… helping.

She brews the tea as fast as humanly possible, the mint stuff they got a few weeks ago in Egypt that Joe’s apparently been obsessed with for years. She pours two thermoses full, and runs through a couple exercises and coping strategies she developed with Isaiah and his therapist over the years as she almost-runs back to the ocean. She can do this, she can absolutely-

There’s no one on the beach when she gets there. She can see the trail of his footprints- very light, almost invisible- moving farther away from the cabin, from her, before they disappear from view down the shoreline. But she can’t see him, and she has no idea how long after she ran back inside that he slipped away. The waves, so quiet before, seem a lot louder now, almost mocking her in how steady they are. Because there’s nothing else here, nothing waiting for her, except for a bowl of ojja still sitting in the sand.

Untouched.

  
***

_  
2\. Cardiff, December 4, 2022_   
  


She could easily sit in the chair by the bed, Nicky has set it there for just that purpose. She could sit there, get her phone out, play a couple rounds of Duolingo, and completely fucking mope for an hour or two…

Or she could face this now.

So instead Nile sits on the edge of the bed, by Joe’s hip, and gently pulls at the blanket covering him, down just far enough to reveal his torso and the completely healed skin there. It’s fine, it’s all fine. No blood, she’d watched Andy and Nicky help him wash it away when he and Nile had gotten back from the bar. No bandages, because there’s no wound anymore.

Like nothing has even happened.

She must have reached out to touch his side to check anyway, because all of a sudden her hand is there and Joe is mumbling, blinking slowly and trying to focus on her face. “Nile?”

“Sorry,” she snatches her hand back. “Sorry, I was just-”

“No, ’s okay,” he blinks heavily, rubs at his face. Because it’s Joe and that’s always how he wakes up, she reminds herself, not because he’s hurt. “You okay?”

She laughs, but it doesn’t sound pretty. “Fuck, Joe.” No other way to answer _that_ question.

“Meant to check on you earlier,” his voice rasps a bit. “Nicky made me sleep first. ’M not allowed out of bed for another hour. He’ll know.”

She tries to laugh again. Still ugly. She drops her head down, facing away from him. “I’m okay.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” his knee comes up to nudge at her a little. “What’s wrong?”

She lifts her head for just a minute, to give him her best ‘are you _kidding_ me?’ look, then drops it back down again, rubbing at her own face. “Fuck.”

“I think you need to say it out loud, Nile.”

“I’m… I don’t feel good. Everything’s wrong.”

“Why?” he sounds so genuinely curious.

“Because it didn’t matter. We didn’t win.”

She hears him prop himself up on his elbows. “What do you mean?”

She feels tears blurring her eyes and squeezes them shut. “Those guys. We weren’t… we weren’t going to win against them. It wasn’t a mission. It wasn’t a job. It was just some stupid, drunk, racist motherfuckers in a bar.”

“And there will always be stupid, drunk, racist motherfuckers in bars, hmm?”

She maybe laughs, though it doesn’t feel or sound like one. “Yeah. And you knew that too. I could see it on your face when you stepped in. But you did it anyway.”

“Nicky would tell you I have a hard time _not_ doing it anyway.”

No laugh this time. “I wish you hadn’t been there.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Why?” he doesn’t sound insulted, at least.

Which is good, because she definitely didn’t mean it that way. “You got hurt.”

She can feel Joe shift a little closer after a hesitation, like he knows that’s only half the answer. “They could have hurt you, or someone else, with much worse.”

“I know. It’s not exactly the first time I’ve been in a situation with guys like that, Joe.”

“Me either.” Another silence. “And if you saw a Black woman, or a Muslim man, being harassed like that, would you have stepped in?”

“Of course, I-” she doesn’t want to lift her head, so she settles for glaring at the floor. “That’s different.”

“How?” 

“Other people aren’t us.” 

“But you’re still a person. And no person deserves to be treated that way.” He nudges at her again. “Keep talking, if you want.”

She smiles a little, tries to at least, no matter how much it pulls at her skin, makes her feel sore and stretched thin. “Back before… before all this, before you guys, my strategy would’ve been- let ’em say whatever they want, as long as they don’t take it any further than that. If nobody gets hurt, you get away fine, it’s a-” her voice catches for a second. “It’s a _win_. I go on living my life and they can’t ever stop that. Now I wish they’d just gone for it right away. Tried to hit me. Then at least I could get rid of the wounds.” 

“Not necessarily a healthier outcome.”

“And it won’t matter either way. Tomorrow, they’ll still be _them_.” And it’s not like she could do anything about it- she can’t find them, she doesn’t even know who _they_ are. Judging by their accents, she’s pretty sure they weren’t even Welsh. Racists get to take vacations too, and they ruin the fuck out of hers.

Joe pushes himself all the way up to sit next to her, bare feet landing heavily on the floor beside hers. “It’s not fun, is it, to adjust to so much, become indestructible in so many ways, and still feel so easily laid out by someone. Not even an evil mastermind, just a someone.”

“Benjamin Franklin said nothing in this world is said to be certain except death and taxes. But fuck both of those. My life has proven it’s really only just stupid, drunk, racist motherfuckers in bars.” She swipes angrily at her eyes. 

“And smart, sober, good people like us fighting back,” he offers quietly. He leans his shoulder against hers just as she does the same. “Though I may not have been completely sober this time.” Voice turning into a mutter, “And Franklin was a prick, anyway.”

She knows he’s being both sincere and light, he’s trying, but… “I still wish you hadn’t been there,” she whispers.

“Why?” He lays his hand out on his leg, palm up. Waiting for both responses.

She answers both, clasps their hands together, gripping tight. “Because it was… I don’t believe anything they said, you know, I know they’re ignorant and hateful and spouting bullshit. But I was still ashamed.” When she gets the word out, she deflates a bit, leaning more into his side. Looking down at their hands so she won’t have to look at anything else. “Not of myself, but of… I don’t know, having you there to hear someone say that shit to me, now, it hit different. Or maybe it hit the same, and that’s what sucked. I don’t know.”

“Okay. Did the things they called me make you think differently of me?”

“What?” She looks up at him, surprised. “No, of course not.” He’s studying her intently, with that full focus of his, wanting so much to make this right for her. She doesn’t know how to tell him she thinks she loves him for that, and just hates that this is something that can never _be_ fixed because the problem isn’t even inside her. It’s out there. “It’s just…” she doesn’t know how to continue. She doesn't know how to make this right either.

Joe breathes in deeply through his nose, out through his mouth. “I’m sorry if me intervening made it worse. If you prefer fighting those battles on your own terms, you can tell me and I'll back you up. I only…” He shudders so slightly, Nile never would’ve felt it if they hadn’t been so pressed together. “I’ve been alone for so many of them, Nile. I didn’t want you to be alone. I’m truly sorry if-” 

“When were you alone?” she asks, maybe demands, wants to know where the hell the others-

“Even if they’re there, even if they step in and defend,” Joe shakes his head. “When you’re the real target, you feel very much alone. You have support, allies, love, but you don’t have… kinship?” He tests the word out, like he’s not sure it’s the right one.

“Yeah.” But she understands anyway. She brings their clasped hands into her own lap, covers them with her other. He has nice hands, Joe. They never really seem as callused and worn as everyone else’s, even Nile’s. Nicky says it’s because Joe is an artist first, warrior second. Joe says it’s just because Allah made him the prettiest out of all of them. 

“The others- I love them, they love me, they’d do anything for me, of course- but they just can’t know what it feels like, and I wouldn’t know how to explain it if I could. The constant… hurt, little cuts on the inside. How it can be so small, sometimes just being looked at differently than the others. Like I don’t belong with them.”

He pauses just to breathe deeply again, and Nile squeezes his hand tighter. “Yeah?”

“Nicky and I- what we are to each other, it can sometimes run up against other stupid, drunk motherfuckers in the world. But it’s not a visible thing. We can walk down the street, side by side, and not be judged,” he smiles down at their hands, and it looks as pained as her smile feels. “Me, I will always be North African. I’m proud of who I am, of my people, and I don’t _want_ to conceal that.”

“You change your name, though,” she points out, not to accuse but to learn why. “For fake IDs and licenses and stuff.”

He nods to that. “Yes, I have. It doesn’t bother me as much, I don’t know why. Maybe because my real name is still with me. Is still spoken by those I love. And if letters on a piece of paper can protect all of us and what we do, I’m okay with that. The people who matter will always know me,” he scrunches up one side of his face, thinking. “You’ll find what works for you. It doesn’t have to be the same as me.”

“Is it…” she tries to figure out exactly what she wants to ask. Joe waits patiently for the words. “Is it scary, when so much of your- _our_ identities is about hiding the truth? Such an important part of you that makes you, I- I don’t know, stand out sometimes?”

“As far as jobs, if that’s part of what you’re asking?” She thinks about it, nods. He nods back. “Not as much anymore. What we do, the world being so very global and connected now, it doesn’t matter as much. And we travel to so many places, to so many different people. I haven’t worried about it on a mission in a long while. It’s the real life moments that cut. The ones we don’t have battle plans for.”

“Still?” she can’t stop herself from asking

Joe is just as careful with his own words. “It was easier, when I had Quynh. When we could halve that weight.”

“When you weren’t alone,” she says quietly. Then, dreading the answer, “And after she was gone?”

Joe taps their fingers together idly, his eyes far away. “It’s hard when you feel like you’re the sole reason everyone in the group has to take extra measures. Depending on the place, the culture, the time period, we might have to guess what inns will deny us a room if I’m standing there, what places will serve us food or not just because of me. Or we’ll be allowed in, but the looks, the comments.”

“Or worse.”

He scrunches up one side of his face, trying to find the right words to answer. “Sometimes. Andy…” he kinda chuckles, but it’s not that wry ‘we killed each other’ laugh. It’s heavier. “Andy once nearly cleaved a man in half for… Nineteenth century. We were going after an oil baron, got caught. The sheriff decided my punishment should be worse because of…” he waves his free hand at himself. “Then he tried to buy me.”

“Jesus.” She doesn’t want to picture it, but she’s always been a history nerd and she can imagine all the things he isn’t saying, and it makes her want to laugh and cry at the same time at the absurdity of all of this. Of everything. So she does.

“It’s possible everyone at that pub is lucky she wasn’t there tonight,” his face softens with such love, and Nile wonders at how he can look like that while thinking of such awful things. “Sometimes I think it’s another reason we travel the world so much. She takes us to places where we don’t always have to worry about being the ‘other.’ I don’t know what in her history has made her think about such things, but she does what she can, when she can.”

“And that works?”

He doesn’t sigh. He doesn’t really do anything, but it still feels like there’s so much going on. “I’ve lived long enough that I’m better at dealing with the little cuts. You learn to process it, learn to cope with it, become secure in yourself. You have to. But I remember the many years of…” he pauses, looks over to her, prompting. Letting her talk out whatever she wants. 

“Every once in awhile, sometimes, you have to remind yourself that there’s nothing wrong with you,” she finishes, weirdly grateful for the release. “Even when you know there’s not. Even when you _know_ it’s not true. The heavy feeling in your chest, how tired and sick it can make you.” Really, really tired.

“And I saw you tonight, saw it happening to you, and I realized you might have to endure it for hundreds of years too, and in many ways it will be _worse_ for you as a woman, as someone with darker skin, and I...” he sighs again, and she hears another apology in it. Not for anything he’s done, but for the world they live in. “My immortal life started with men hating me for being me. I didn’t want that for you.”

"With the Crusades… with…" she tries, stops, starts again. "Nicky was taught to hate, and I know he's worked and fought like hell to overcome that. But how do you overcome being the one who’s hated?"

And Joe has no answer for her, and she realizes maybe part of her wasn't expecting there to be one. 

“It’s never going to go away.” She hasn’t really truly accepted it yet, maybe that’s what’s felt so wrong tonight- how long Joe has lived with these things, how long she’ll have to.

He turns his head to kiss her temple very softly, and she leans gratefully into it. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “I truly don’t. But I do know things change, get better, and I don’t realize it until I’ve looked back. When I think of how much my life has changed since I was your age... I’ve met horrible people, but I’ve met Nicky, and the others, and you. I lost my family, but gained this one. I’ve been blessed to see the entire world, good and bad. Men and women have treated me as worse than an animal, but so many others, and more with every decade it seems, fight for people who look like you and me. And if they can keep fighting, how can I not fight too?”

“And it’s enough?” Nile asks. “It’s enough to keep you going?”

“It’s enough to make me love this world and so many of the people in it,” Joe says, soft but sure. “We can’t change evil. We can only try to end each day having come out on top of it, and hopefully having helped others do the same. It may never go away, but other, better things aren’t ever going away either. That’s so much more important. Vital. That’s what I’d want you to remember, if you can.”

“Better things. Like what? Us?” She sniffles a little, rests her head on his shoulder.

“Most definitely. They can’t kill us. And they can’t stop us, either.” A different ‘us.’ But also not, Nile is pretty sure. “I don’t enjoy fighting, you know. Generally. It’s not… it’s not what’s in my heart.” _An artist first_ , Nile hears in Nicky’s voice. “I don’t like fighting, and I don't like that we have to, but I cherish what we fight for.”

And she gets it, she really does. “Part of me still kinda wishes you hadn’t been there,” she pulls his hand up to her chest, holds it over her heart. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

He brings his free hand up to wipe at the last of the tears on her face. “I’m glad you’re here too. Nile, I know I’m not your…” he stops for a second, seems to reorder and regather his thoughts. Just like she does. _A family trait,_ she thinks idly. “We have some different histories, yes, but if you ever need to talk through something the others might not understand? I’d like to be here for you for that.”

She smiles. A real one. It doesn’t hurt this time, it’s a balm soothing away the bitter sting from before. “I could be that for you too, you know?” _We could halve that weight._

All those lines of sadness smooth away from his face, and he gives her an endearing, pleasantly surprised smile back. “I would love that.”

They stay in silence for a few minutes, sitting against each other, hands gripping tightly, when a soft knock at the door has them looking up (but not letting go). Nicky opens the door with a curious look on his face, turning to concern for just a few seconds at the mood he can sense, but he seems to know it isn’t for him to ask. He doesn’t move into the room, doesn’t intrude, just leans against the doorway and offers up a slight smile. “Thought you might like to go outside for a bit.”

“Wait, what?” Nile blinks at him. It’s, like, two in the morning. And winter. 

She feels Joe’s laugh rumble through them both. “And what is outside that has convinced my very strict yet very beautiful doctor to let me out of very unnecessary bedrest an hour early?”

Nicky is grinning now, and it’s that wide, pure one she’s only ever seen him direct at Joe. “Put on a shirt, my love.” And then tosses two heavy winter coats at the bed. “It’s snowing.”

“Why is that-?”

But Joe is already up from the bed, cutting off Nile’s question. He manages to throw on a shirt and coat in record time, taking up Nile’s hand again and tugging her out of the room. “First snow of the season.”

“Joe,” she sighs, wrangling her hand free so he can hurry down the stairs without her falling at his heels. She turns to Nicky, her bastion of logic and sanity... who hands her the other coat he’d brought. “Really?”

Nicky shrugs as they walk down the stairs at a slower pace. He’s already wearing his coat, she realizes. Oh Jesus, these nerds. “It’s tradition, Nile. We don’t always get to be in cold climates for winter, but when we do, the first snow of the season is to be savored. It’s good luck.”

“To who?” she asks, fishing her boots out of the pile next to the back door and slipping them on. “Which civilization or famous shaman or poet did you learn _this_ one from?”

But then Andy is between them, shoving past to get outside, a fold out chair under one arm, gloves and a scarf already in place. “This one’s ours,” she says with a smile all her own.

And if Nile is struck dumb by that- the sudden appearance of Andy, her answer, her unchecked and unguarded smile- nobody seems to care. She shuts the back door behind her as she follows Nicky out into the garden. The snow really is falling, big, heavy, sparkling flakes already blanketing the ground. It’s dark except for the light from inside the house, and they’re far enough away from the city limits that the only sounds are the light wind and the swish of snowflakes hitting the roof and garden awning.

Peaceful. Pure.

Andy has parked her chair under the awning, crossing her legs at the ankle so just her feet are getting hit by the snow. Head leaning back against the top of the chair, she closes her eyes and smiles, breathing it all in deeply. Nicky beckons Nile to follow him to Joe, who is standing out in the middle of the yard, with his face turned upwards, eyes closed, and a smile so much like Andy’s. _A family trait._

She lets Nicky pull her forward until she’s standing nestled in between him and Joe, the three of them bundling together a bit for warmth. Nicky keeps his eyes forward, looking out at the yard, the fields and trees beyond. Or maybe he’s looking at something else entirely; Nile guesses maybe he is. Nicky is always looking at more than what’s just in front of him. And right now he’s breathing deeply, serenely. Happily. 

Nile matches her breathing to his, closes her own eyes, and lets all of the pain and anger and fear from earlier wash away for now. She’s here, she’s happy, she’s safe and healthy and surrounded by love. She’s a warrior. She isn’t undone, and she definitely isn’t doing this fight- any fight- on her own.

She opens her eyes after awhile to look at Nicky again, and then Joe, and can’t help but laugh at the snow already caught in his hair and beard. He grins back at her, dodging out of the way when she tries to reach up and brush it off him. “Joe-”

“Nope! I like it,” he spins and ducks again when she feints right and tries to grab at him, out of spite more than anything now.

“Yusuf al-Kaysani, don’t _make_ me pull out that long-ass full name of yours-”

“Nope!” he slides through the snow over to Nicky, intent on using him as a shield, but Nicky just smirks and takes one big step back, leaving him open. 

Joe turns to gasp at him, clutching at his heart. “Oh, alas, that my love would leave me so-”

“Ha!” she lunges forward, jumping up onto his back, legs around his waist, and nearly knocks him down with the force of it. “Got ya.”

“I am beset on all sides by treachery,” he whines, still trying to duck his head away from her ruffling at his hair and getting the snow out of his curls, even as his arms come up to brace and support her legs. 

“Maybe she’s just helping you not get pneumonia,” Andy points out from her chair, watching them with eyes that are a little more loving than she probably would want them to see.

Nile pauses her next plan of attack on the snow in Joe’s beard, cocking her head to the side. “Can we get pneumonia?”

“No-” 

“ _Yes_.” Nicky cuts off Joe’s apparently incorrect answer with a scolding look. “Nova Scotia.” 

Joe also cocks his head to the side, forcing her to straighten back up so she can see, and frowns. “Which time?”

“The time we all got pneumonia,” Andy supplies.

Joe’s frown stays for a moment, as if he genuinely can’t remember, just long enough for Nile to see the looks on Andy’s and Nicky’s faces soften- in fondness, not worry ( _what happened in Nova Scotia?_ )- long enough for Nile to shift her arms to wrap comfortably around Joe’s shoulders and neck, and then his face clears and his grin is bright again. “It’s nice that we can look back on these things and laugh.” And then he spins wildly, trying to buck Nile off of his back.

“Joe!” she shrieks, a voice she hasn’t used in years, since she was little, since she and her brother and cousins would dash through the apartment building in the most important game of tag that had even been played (until the next time they played). 

“Treachery!” he fires back, or tries to, laughing as she goes to attack his beard again. She uses both hands, because she knows she can. Because she knows, no matter what she does, he’s going to hold her up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is going through it right now, the lovely and wonderful Ayo Edebiri made a list of Black mental health resources: https://twitter.com/ayoedebiri/status/1308955025578680321 on twitter. Please feel free to look through them if you need it. And if you’re doing okay and can afford to, a lot of these groups could use donations <3


	5. Tonight There's No Tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last one! Cheers to Nile & Andy. Warnings for: temporary character death in the second story. 
> 
> (Chapter title is from the Prince song “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night.” Never a bad time to listen to Prince, friends. Go for it.)

_1\. Kyoto, September 3, 2028_

  
The day starts nice, at least. It starts _beautiful_. It starts with birds chirping and a peaceful sunrise and everything finally in full autumn colors in the garden behind their rented house. It starts with Andy sitting herself down next to Nile right as she starts her morning meditation against the trunk of one of the pretty, red-hued trees.

And Nile is (probably noticeably, to Andy) relieved to see her here, for this. It’s been a few months since Quynh showed up in Vancouver, and while right now they’re on another Because-I-Said-So rest courtesy of Nile, the fact that in three days they’re meeting back up with Quynh in Hanoi as a sort of test run on a job for all six of them…

Yeah, Nile is kinda happy Andy wants to meditate right now. Even if, somehow, improbably, she’s better at it than Nile today. For all the shiny sun and chirpy birds and peaceful falling leaves, Nile can’t get her mind to settle. Because Quynh is going to join them, and then there’ll be six of them, the most there’s ever been at one time together, and Nile is just a little-

“Hey.”

She looks up with a start from where she’d been staring down at her own jittery knee. And doesn’t know whether to be comforted or worried at the searching look in Andy’s eyes. “Yeah?”

“How’s it going?” She asks in that tone that means she knows exactly how it’s going, and she knows Nile really doesn’t.

“Fine.” Because it wasn’t that long ago that she was a teenager, and she’s nothing if not a master at how to noncommittally answer a probing question. 

“Everything’s fine?”

“Yep.” Her knee is bouncing for absolutely no reason, thank you very much.

“Okay.” The only person better at the casual I-don’t-believe-you-and-never-have tone was her mom. “Okay. Tell me about Nicky.”

“Tell you… what?”

Andy does that thing where she’s smiling without smiling. “Tell me about Nicky. What do you know about his family?”

“Two older brothers,” she answers automatically. Her voice and her brain go into ‘debrief’ mode. She has no idea what this is, some memory training exercise probably. To practice learning info about a mark, maybe, or retain information as she gets older. “Noble family. They weren’t, like, loaded, but they lived comfortably. His oldest brother took over their father’s title, second brother… bought? I think? An office working for the local bishop. He got sick and died on the ship on the way to fight in the Crusades. Nicky didn’t find that out until years later. Um… his mother raised them and he loved her. A lot. She encouraged him to become a priest. His father was distant, treated them all more like assets to his fortune than family. Nicky doesn’t really try to remember too much about him.”

“Joe?”

“Three sisters,” her brain supplies for her. “Oldest took Joe and his younger sister in and raised them after she got married. He was probably eight or nine at the time.” Because Joe’s father had died and his mother abandoned the family after that. (And his father’s death had been by his own hand, but Nile doesn’t say that part out loud, barely thinks it too loudly, because it’s something Joe rarely says out loud.) “Her husband was a merchant, Joe started working for him when he was old enough. Probably before he was old enough, but he was good at talking to customers as a little kid.”

“And Booker.”

“He had a younger brother. And a dog he loved more than the brother most days. The brother ended up in prison for theft and they never reconnected before Booker joined up with y’all, but he named one of his sons after him. His mother worked too hard as a maid for some snooty rich family, his father did odd jobs until he died of pneumonia when Booker was in his twenties. He met his wife at the theater, one of the Shakespeare plays that Nicky and Joe specifically hate.”

“What do they love that they think everyone else doesn’t know about?”

“Tap dancing,” she says immediately. She. Does. Not. Fail. Quizzes. “Nicky does. He gets down those rabbit holes of watching videos of dancers, Gene Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers and all them. Joe got super emotionally invested in the first season of Drag Race All Stars and still won’t watch any other seasons because he’s convinced they won’t be as good as that one. Booker has been playing in an online D&D game since getting sober.”

Andy laughs. “Okay. I actually didn’t know the last one.”

“He doesn’t want the guys to know because he’s afraid they’ll join and end up being better at it than him,” she confides. Extra credit and all that. And maybe a little bit to make Andy laugh some more. 

So she’s in the middle of telling Andy about Nicky's newest baking obsession (mille-feuille, but he calls them Napoleons just to fuck with Booker), Joe’s late night excursions onto the roofs of whatever places they stay at- he’s drawing star constellations again, trying to compare them to ones he drew hundreds of years ago, when she catches Andy’s piercing look again, this time more knowing, satisfied.

She stops. “What?”

Andy looks… patient. Which is creepy, because outside of stalking a mark in order to time a kill correctly, Andy is _never_ patient. “If you don’t see it by now…” she chuckles. “You know us all, Nile. More than you think. You know us as individuals and as a group. Because you’re one of us, and you don’t have to doubt that anymore. Not even if Quynh comes back for real.”

“I…” Because fuck, Andy’s right on it, isn’t she? She had figured things out enough to keep from drowning when it had just been her, Andy, and Booker. She had settled and grown and figured herself out with Andy, Joe, and Nicky. But now with Booker back, and Quynh not far behind? Nile knows who she is, but she’s still unsure of where she is. What she’s a part of.

“Sometimes, what we do? It can feel like it’s fifty-fifty fighting and living,” Andy continues on. “You’ve got the fighting part down, you’re a part of the team. We’re seamless on a job, you know this. I don’t have to worry about you covering my back. I’m-” she smiles a little for real. Not with her eyes. With her actual _mouth_. “I’m grateful to have you covering it. Got it?”

“Got it,” her voice absolutely doesn’t wobble, because the ultimate earthly badass of history pretty much just called _her_ a badass, and she is not a wobbly badass. “It’s just-”

“The ‘living’ part will come,” Andy cuts in. “It already is. You’re doing so well. You’re not just a part of the team, kid. You’re a part of the family too. You can’t tell me you don’t know how much the boys loves you. You can’t.”

As always, Andy’s right. She can’t. Booker who always offers the best understanding when she has her holy-shit-I’m-immortal freakouts, and on the opposite side of things, always knows how to ground her when the adrenaline and endorphins have her flying too close to the sun. Nicky who sits with her when she listens to music, creates playlists with her, learns them on his own and quietly sings them back to her at night if they’re staying in places without electricity. Joe who has an unnatural love of Post Its and will randomly sneak one into her left shoe for her to find, decorated with sweet poems or silly drawings. Usually does it at night for her to find in the morning, but twice now he’s managed to do it _while she’s wearing the shoe_ , which _how the fuck_.

And then there’s Andy, too. Who just… knows. Who always knows. Who has such a hardass exterior and such an intensely loving, caring heart inside. Who has died and killed for humanity over and over for thousands of years, and still wants to sit in a back yard with Nile and make sure she’s okay.

She swallows back whatever inadequate words she could possibly say and just nods, offers a smile, hopes her own eyes can convey half of what Andy’s able to.

Andy nods back and then, to her surprise, takes a deep breath like she’s steeling herself for something. The same way she does right before storming a stronghold, or chopping off somebody’s trapped limb, or saying shit she knows nobody’s going to like. 

Nile’s arms and legs are fine. Which means…

“So, I need you to do me a favor, okay?”

Oh shit. 

“When I die.”

Oh _shit_. “What the fuck?” is only slightly more adequate than before, but it’s the best she’s got.

Andy seems to be expecting that reaction. “I’m going to die, Nile. Whether it’s on a job or old age in a couple decades or, I don’t- a shark attack three years from now, who the fuck knows. But we know it’s going to happen. And it’s not-” she stops for a second, looks out across the trees and flowers, and figures out the right words. “It’s not going to be easy for them.”

Nile can’t handle this. She can’t. Not right now, not in a couple decades, and not in a three years’ time ( _yeah right, like Andy wouldn’t fight a shark and win)._

“Quynh will take off. Disappear for a while. She won’t be used to the whole group again yet. All you can do is let her. She’ll come back when she’s ready.” Andy smiles then, and it’s her Quynh smile, a new one for Nile that she’s only recently started to catalogue. 

The smile fades. “Booker will be angry. He’ll hide it, or try to. He’ll wallow, he might start drinking again, he’ll lash out at all of you, but it’ll be from anger. At himself. For wasting time, for not being able to control this, for wanting to die before. He’ll need an outlet, or something good, something constructive to focus on. Not a mission, but a… a responsibility. Honestly, making him look after the other guys would be best. Gets a couple birds with one stone.”

“What are the other birds?” Nile asks through a sandpaper-rough throat. “Nicky and Joe?”

Andy nods. “Nicky _will_ try to take care of everyone. At the expense of himself. He’ll lock it all away, he’ll want to make sure everyone else is cared for and ignore everything to do with himself. He’ll make enough food to feed everyone for weeks and skip his own meals. Give you all the hugs you want and not let himself be touched at all. You need to make sure that doesn’t happen, that he includes himself in all that and doesn’t burn out.”

And then she sighs. “And Joe… Joe, I don’t know, really. He’ll let it all happen. He’ll let Quynh leave, he’ll let Booker rail at him, he’ll let Nicky feed him, but I don’t know if it’ll hit him.” Nile thinks of those first two months after Merrick, him letting Nicky cut his hand over the bathroom sink every morning, and thinks Andy’s probably right. But there’s this weird buzzing in her head, and in her stomach, and it stops her from saying anything out loud.

“I think, deep down, he’ll work through everyone else’s grief except his own. Just make sure he doesn’t feel guilty for his own feelings or for trying to cheer anyone else up, okay?” Andy’s voice breaks a little, but she ignores it, plows on. “It’d probably be best for him and Nicky to co-lead missions for awhile, they’re good at balancing each other with strategy. Quynh will take over when she’s ready.”

“What the _fuck?”_ she finally finds enough air to say.

Andy looks back at her, confused. “What?”

“The fuck is this?” she’s started now, and she can’t stop. “You come in with a pep talk just to give me the job of taking care of everyone else? Make it my responsibility to fix everyone? What the absolute fuck-”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Andy argues, shakes her head, but it’s kinda obvious she _did_. At least a little.

“Okay then, what am I going to be like after you die? Who’s going to take care of me? Or am I taking care of myself? My grief won’t be as much as the others, so nobody has to worry?”

“Nile,” Andy’s voice is patient again, and all it really does is make that buzzing in her get louder and stronger. “You’re going to be fine. I know that.”

Her turn to shake her head, and she plants both hands on the ground on either side of her, so she can be ready to stand up and _get out_ of this as soon as possible. “You think I’m going to be fine because you want someone to be responsible for everyone else, or you think I’m going to be fine because you haven't thought enough about me and what I might feel?”

“Haven’t thought enough-? Kid, this might not have occurred to you yet, but I really do think you’re strong. You’re so strong, you’re probably the-”

“I’m not!” she says, desperately trying to keep herself from tipping over. “Telling me I’m strong doesn’t make me strong. It makes me less _me_ -” 

“I just…” Andy laughs, angry and harsh, surprised by the turn of events, apparently. “Nile, I need to know I can count on someone to-”

“And that has to be me? You’ve known every single one of them for centuries. You can’t count on them? But me, the strong independent woman, I can take it?”

“I don’t understand why that’s an insult,” Andy’s staring at her like she’s the crazy one.

“Yeah, welcome to my world,” Nile snaps. “Strong shouldn’t mean I don’t get to be emotional or messy or need someone to care about me too. I shouldn’t _have_ to be strong, not like this. You don’t get to tell me I’m a part of the family and then not let me need them, too. That’s not fair. It’s bullshit.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of things are bullshit,” Andy snaps right back. Mortality has softened her some, but it doesn’t erase thousands of years of pigheadedness, apparently. “I don’t really know what I’m doing with this either, okay?”

“No. Not okay. None of this is okay.”

“Exactly. I’ve never died before. So, yeah, guess what, I’m going to fuck some things up-”

“Yeah, you really are.” Nile finally does push herself up to her feet, not like she’d be getting any meditating done now anyway. “I’m going to be sad when you die, asshole. At least give me that much credit, instead of leaving me to clean up whatever mess you leave behind.” And she walks back inside, leaves Andy still sitting cross-legged on the ground. Because she can be angry as openly as she wants, but if she needs to cry?

She’s going to do that alone.

  
***

_  
2\. Zadar, July 12, 2030_

  
There’s something Nile can quietly appreciate about a full-fledged, straightforward firefight. They shoot at you, you shoot at them. No evasive maneuvers, no throwing somebody out of a window with just a rope tied around their arm, no race to the top or bottom of a building. It ends when the blood or the bullets run out, whichever comes first. 

“Motherfuckers, I will strangle you with your lower intestines,” Andy mutters next to her, reloading a new clip.

Not everyone agrees with Nile, of course. “You good?”

“I’m out,” she grunts back. “Quynh!”

A full clip drops from the scaffolding above them, landing perfectly into Andy’s waiting hand. Nile takes the opportunity to re-sight everyone. Booker and Joe are pinned down not too far from Andy and Nile, maybe thirty yards. They’re closer to the gang currently shooting at them, but Joe has his saif and Booker has a lot of pent-up aggression he can’t drink away anymore, so they’re a good second line of defense. Quynh is spotting for Nicky up in the scaffolding, the sniper rifle acting as their first line.

And Nile is just trying not to get shot. Again. (Four is enough.) “So these are the guys, right? That those guys in South- oh shit!-” she ducks below another bullet. Ha, no number five for her. “South Africa sold you out to?”

“Oh yeah,” she can tell how pissed Andy is, because nothing she says gets above a growl. “Still whining that we busted their ring- what, like, fifteen years ago now? Jesus. Get some closure, you assholes, I-”

A couple things happen at once, or so quickly one after another that Nile can’t tell the difference. Will look back at this moment years, decades, centuries from now and still not know. Andy kneels up above the cover to take aim as the gang fires at them. The bullets don’t sound any different, not louder, not softer, not angrier.

But it’s still an entirely different sound when they hit Andy.

Andy doesn’t react at first, and neither does Nile. They both just kinda stare at two rapidly growing blood stains on Andy’s torso. Her stomach, below the ribs. And just left of the center of her chest. Andy doesn’t make a sound, and neither does Nile. But Quynh screams something above them, and Booker is yelling from thirty yards away, and Nicky is firing his rifle in quick, sharp succession. Nile senses movement to the right, intuitively knows it’s Booker and Joe taking advantage of Nicky’s cover fire and vaulting over their own blockade, running down the last of the gang to fight in close combat.

Nile is still staring at the blood. There’s more of it now there than was a few seconds ago. There’s more every time she blinks. 

She only moves when Andy does, reality snapping back in place like a rubber band behind her eyes. She grabs at her as Andy slumps back down, catches her and eases her to the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…”

“Yeah,” Andy grits, closing her eyes tight for a few seconds. “‘Bout sums it up, yeah.”

Nicky and Quynh barely make any noise when they drop down to them, taking up position on either side of Andy while Nile kneels by her head.

“Getting slow in your old age,” Quynh admonishes, her voice only slightly hysterical, only slightly frantic. “I’m so very unimpressed.” She and Nicky move like some sort of coordinated dance, each putting pressure on one of the wounds, Nicky kicking his first aid bag towards Nile. She immediately pulls out bandages, alcohol, tossing those back in Nicky’s direction. 

Andy kinda laughs at that, biting it off before it can turn into a groan as Nicky starts trying to dress the wounds, stop the flow of blood that’s just… everywhere. It’s everywhere.

And that’s terrifying. Quynh trying to be gentle and trying not to panic is terrifying. But worst of all is Nicky. Because he’s not kind, cajoling, Andy-shut-up-this-is-for-your-own-god-damned-mortal-good Nicky, the persona he’s perfected to treat Andy’s wounds the last ten years. No. This Nicky is clinical, focused, and devoid of everything but _this_. A Nicky she’s really only seen once before.

“Nile, grab her hands,” his voice sharp and stoic. He’s tunnel-visioned down to Andy’s wounds and nothing else, doesn’t even look up as Nile stutters for a second before deciding she better just do what he says, taking Andy’s hands in her own just as Andy tries instinctively, and somewhat weakly ( _no_ ), to push away from what’s causing her pain.

“Shit,” Andy chokes out. “This isn’t gonna… shit.”

There’s more movement, quick and purposeful, in their direction, but before Nile can go for her gun or even tense up, she recognizes Booker and Joe. They’re almost stumbling in their haste, covered in blood, Booker’s shoulder popping back into its socket even as they get close enough to really see-

“No, no, no, no, no…” Joe drops to his knees but keeps coming, reaching for Andy.

“Don’t, Joe, the blood,” Nicky’s voice is still clipped, short, even with Joe. Nile remembers in that moment- they’d had Copley test their blood types a few months after Andy’s mortality, just in case. Nicky has the same blood type as Andy, and Nile already knew from blood drives that she’s a universal donor. Joe is neither, and she remembers how funny they’d all thought it was that he’d been legitimately sad about it. Right now she doesn’t think she’ll ever laugh again.

But if Nicky’s worried about that, then Andy’s going to live, right? Because he wouldn’t be worried about it she were really… 

Joe isn’t really listening to Nicky, or maybe can’t hear him, or maybe can’t help himself anyway. He still tries to reach for her. “You can’t...” 

Nicky tries again in a couple other languages, telling him to move back, but Joe has his own tunnel vision, and Nicky can’t lift his hands from Andy’s stomach. His face hardens even more- Nile is reminded for just a moment of Cape Town, of making decisions that you have to even if it will hurt- and Nile thinks maybe this isn’t just about blood types- “Booker. Keep him away.”

Nile looks at him with wide eyes, sees Booker do the same for a fraction of a second before he kneels down too, grabs Joe with both arms and holds him back. Joe struggles, but it’s half-hearted at best, his eyes never leaving Andy.

Andy winces again at added pressure from Nicky and Quynh, looking up at the sky, at none of them. “It’s okay, Yusuf. It’s okay.”

It’s not okay. _None of this is okay_.

Andy uses some reserve of strength to twitch her leg to the side, nudge at Nicky. Still not looking at any of them. “It’s okay.”

And that sounds an awful lot like ‘stop.’ Like Andy knows what’s going on, knows what the rest of them don’t. _It’s not okay._ Nicky doesn’t argue with her, doesn’t take his hands away from her wound, but he doesn’t reach for another bandage either. He closes his eyes and takes in one really deep breath, nods. Nile isn’t sure who he’s nodding to. He might not either.

Andy hasn’t looked away from that spot in the sky she’s been staring at, but she takes a (somewhat) deep breath too. “Book?”

“Yeah, boss,” he responds immediately, like he’s just been waiting for her to give him an order.

And so she does. “You have to take care of yourself. And them. Understand me?”

“Andy-”

“Take. Care.”

He nods, even though she can’t see him. His face is half buried in Joe’s shoulder, anyway. Joe, who’s shaking his head, both hands grasping Booker’s arm across his chest, pulling ineffectually. 

Andy cranes her neck then, just enough to see him, then up at Nicky, smiles at both of them. “My boys.” There’s an awful sound from one of them, maybe both. “I haven’t said it enough, but my-” she pauses to catch her breath, her own awful sound. “My life got so much better from meeting you. _I_ was better.”

They say something in reply, at the same time, in a jumble of languages Nile’s brain can’t translate at the moment, but it makes Andy sigh, relax back on the ground. Her eyes land on Quynh, her smile getting bloodier by the minute, the last of her life staining her teeth. “Not- not bad for my last words, hmm?”

Quynh smiles back, and it’s not as sad as Nile would’ve thought. “Not bad. None of this is bad.” Her hand curls against Andy’s face, leaving a streak of blood near her chin. “None of it. It’s just… time.” Nile isn’t sure who Quynh is really consoling.

“I was just starting to get good again,” Andy whispers. “Really… feel good. About all this. What we do.”

“You’ve always been good, Andromache.”

“The want was back,” Andy argues stubbornly, trying to explain. “I- I wanted. To do this. After… everything. And you. I just got you _back_.”

Quynh just keeps her smile. “And at some point, down this road, you’ll have me again.”

Nile shuts her eyes tightly, pretty sure she’s not going to be able to handle whatever comes next. (‘Whatever.’ Like she doesn’t know what’s coming.) But her eyes pop back open at a squeeze to her hand. Andy’s looking up at her now. “I…”

“I didn’t forget about you,” Andy says. Sort of says. Forces it out between breaths that are getting slower and wet with blood in her lungs- they can all hear it. “I don’t want you to think I’d forget about you.”

“You can’t do this right now,” she says back, and means it to be cool and teasing and fond and everything Andy’s somehow still able to be. She means it to sound strong. It’s none of these things. “You can’t.”

“I don’t think there’s a choice here.” Andy’s hand clutches Nile’s harder, and it’s… it’s real. It’s Andy.

“I’m not ready, though,” Nile protests brokenly.

“Neither am I,” she can’t shrug, she can’t move, but Nile can hear the gesture in her voice. Her rapidly weakening, thready voice. “But it’s never up to us.”

“I hate when you do it, but I don’t know what to do without you to tell me what to do,” she bursts out with, somewhere between a laugh and a sob surrounding the babbling mess of words.

Andy wants to laugh, Nile can see it, and she can also see that Andy doesn’t have the strength for it. “‘M proud of you, you know that? You’re going to be so good…” she trails off. Nile can’t even really feel her hand anymore either. This is… this is it.

Andy seems to know it, too. She looks up at Quynh again. She sighs, really softly. Then her body goes loose, like it’s the most calm and relaxed she’s been in thousands of years.

But it’s not really that. Because her eyes are still open, but they’re not looking at Quynh. They’re not looking at anything. She’s not breathing.

She’s gone.

The next moment freezes and stretches for forever, a new forever, and moves at a thousand different speeds at the same time. Nile’s brain tracks everything and nothing. Everyone. No one. Distantly, she’s aware of Nicky bowing his head over Andy, jaw clenching tightly, a wounded sound almost escaping his throat before being choked back, and then his lips move silently. Maybe he’s praying or… or last rites? Is that still a thing?

She’s aware of Quynh launching herself up to her feet but not going far, pacing, grabbing at her necklace, opening her mouth to say something and never finding the words. She’s aware of Booker cursing, repeating the same words in French over and over, tears gathered in his eyes but not falling. He’s still got his arms around Joe, more a hug than a hold now. 

“No?” Joe is still trying to pull forward, still trying to touch Andy. He gets an arm free, hand landing on her boot, disbelief on his face as he- almost childlike- prods her foot like he’s trying to wake her up from a nap. “But... Nicky?”

“No, Yusuf-” Nicky straightens back up just in time, grabs Joe as he finally breaks from Booker’s hold, and the two of them crash together and end up sitting on the ground, overlapping each other. They’re silent now, holding each other, shaking, faces buried in each other’s necks.

Booker stands slowly, staggers, the weariness and weight keeping it from being a smooth motion. He runs a hand over his face, over his hair, back to his face again. Keeps the back of his hand against his mouth like he’s trying to keep something in, or stop something from getting out. Then a few furious blinks and he moves towards Quynh, reaching for her, bringing her into his chest when her pacing gets her close enough to him.

Nile is aware of all this, but she’s just frozen, just staring. Andy’s eyes are open, and she should close them for her. That’s what you do, right? It’s a sign of respect. A sign of- 

Nile is the only one still staring, so she’s the only one who sees it. Movement. The barest hint of it. Neurological response, she tells herself. Because this isn’t like when the others get shot and come back. When their eyelids twitch like that, it means they’re about to wake up. Andy… Andy is dead.

Andy is dead and Nile is in the first stage of grief. And hallucinating to cope, that’s the only explanation for what she’s seeing. The wounds on Andy’s chest and stomach are slowly, centimeter by centimeter, stitching back together. Nile is officially losing it. Her brain can’t handle what’s going on and has decided to lie to her about-

The wounds are _healing_. They are. Healing. And- and there’s a twitch to Andy’s eyelids, and her chest is rising- “Guys?!” she shrieks, pushes herself backwards, landing on her ass and her hands, scrambling away from what she can only assume is a zombie, because _what the fuck is this_ -

Andy gasps loudly, extra loudly in this space and time where she shouldn’t be making any sound at all, and if Nile had a shred of sanity left in her she would laugh at how freaked out _everyone_ is. Except Quynh. By the time Andy has shot up to sitting, Quynh is back to kneeling next to her, arms thrown around her.

Booker near-collapses to the ground next to Nile, shaking his head, eyes as wide as hers probably are. Nile flails for him without moving her eyes away from Andy, finally finding his arm and holding on tight. 

“Hey, hey, hey,” Quynh is calm, soothing even. Her hands frame Andy’s face again, this time wiping the blood away. “Look at me, look at me, Andromache.”

Andy is still gasping for breath, her eyes wild, roaming the whole place, at every thing and every person. “What-”

“Look at me,” Quynh repeats. 

Andy looks at her. Slows her breathing bit by bit. Her hands come up to grasp at Quynh in return. The world slowly rights itself, and they’re all still staring at Andy, and she’s staring at them, and, “What kind of fairytale bullshit is this?” she asks, voice scratchy.

Quynh laughs a little, shrugs. “Guess there is still some work for you to do.”

Andy tips her head forward to rest against Quynh’s. “Not just work.”

It’s quiet all around them still. Nile looks past them for a second, then clears her throat. “Hey, Andy?” 

Andy tips her face in Nile’s direction without breaking contact with Quynh. “Yeah, kid?”

She almost falters at that, at hearing Andy impossibly say that again, feels Booker shudder a slightly hysterical laugh next to her. She swallows hard. “Do you think maybe, like, considering the circumstances, you could put Joe and Nicky out of their misery and let them hug you?”

She’s smiling even before she turns to look at them. Nicky’s got a hand covering his face, over his eyes, his other hand still clutching Joe close against him. Joe is hiding absolutely nothing, tears running unchecked down his face, both of his hands out flat against Nicky’s thigh, bracing himself for what seems like an imminent breakdown.

“Poor kitten and puppy,” Quynh murmurs, fond, full of love (this, Nile realizes, is the Quynh from before, their real Quynh), just loud enough for Nile to hear.

Andy laughs breathlessly. “Get your asses over here.” She beckons Nile and Booker too, and they all move in at the same time, a scramble of limbs, and Nile is pretty sure she’s never been in a group hug quite like this before. She has no idea who exactly she’s clutching, who’s holding her. Except Andy. She’s acutely aware of Andy next to her, Andy’s hand clasped around the back of her neck, Andy brushing a quick kiss to her forehead. “You okay?” she asks quietly.

Which is absurd. But very Andy, in the midst of some crazy-ass resurrection, making sure her family is okay. “Yeah,” Nile answers just as softly. “Yeah. I am.”

Everything was okay. More than okay.

Everyone was where they were supposed to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, funny story? I legit had Andy die at the end of this, and it was all “let me go, I’m ready to go, it’s my time,” etc etc... but then realized that I hadn’t warned for major character death in the tags. And I couldn’t just, like, sneak that tag in now, that’d be shitty. So I had to rewrite her last words and the whole tone and ending. So Andy lives! Because of a clerical error!
> 
> Thank you so so much to everyone for reading and/or kudoing and/or commenting! Wonderful, wonderful people, you lot.

**Author's Note:**

> Since the vignettes skip around in time, here’s what they’d look like in chronological order:
> 
> Booker #1: Paris, August 30, 2020  
> Quynh #1: Le Havre, February 28, 2021  
> Joe #2: Cardiff, December 4, 2022  
> Nicky #2: Mexico City, March 29, 2023  
> Nicky #1: Cape Town, June 3, 2024  
> Booker #2: Thun, December 24, 2026  
> Joe #1: Ahipara, October 26, 2027  
> Quynh #2: Bowen Island, April 9, 2028  
> Andy #1: Kyoto, September 3, 2028  
> Andy #2: Zadar, July 10, 2030


End file.
